N.S.Trubeckojus ir Prahos lingvistinis ratelis. Apie kai kuriuos intelektualinių struktūralizmo ištakų aspektus
N.S.Trubetzkoy and the Prague Linguistic Circle

Summary/Abstract: Today Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy’s works are seen in a new light. Trubetzkoy‘s magnum opus, Principles of Phonology, was issued posthumously. In this book he defined phoneme as a smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline separate from phonetics. Short insights on morphonology evoking debates and treated controversy now have found the niche. Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was born into an extremely refined environment, was a Russian linguist whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder not only of phonology but also of morphophonology. Having graduated from the Moscow University, he delivered lectures there until the revolution. Thereafter he moved to the University of Sofia, and later took the chair of Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna. He died from a heart attack. Trubetzkoy’s three postulates of morphonology are: the phonological structure of morphemes; the combinatory phonic modifications of morphemes which happen when they are combined; the alternation series which serve a morphological function. Morphonology can provide the systematic inventory of a language suitable to decode to machine readable language. The question arises whether morphonological alternations have a sign character. A sign is a form and meaning. Language system of signs defines morphemes as semi-signs and the phonemes as they have no meaning – not a sign. Morphonological alternations concerning this issue are treated dubiously. A subject of morphonology includes minimal distinctive features, which do not bear any sign function, but carry out certain marking (distinguishing) role in oppositions of word-forms of one word. Hence, the morphonology studies markers non-signs (alternations). There are two chief variants of description of morphoneme: one in the sense of Ulashin where morphoneme is described as each of phonemes alternating in structure of morphemes, and a morphoneme in Trubetzkoy’s sense – all series of alternating phonemes. Thus instead of a traditional binary opposition of the morphoneme (a component of a morpheme) and the phoneme (a component of a morph) Tolstaja offers to introduce a trinomial opposition “a morphoneme – a morphophoneme – a phoneme”. Morphonology studies specific regularities of the phonological set of morphemes and words and this is its principal difference from the phonology, which studies the sound composition of language, separately from its relation to the morphological boundaries and the morphological identities.

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