Weak and Strong Positions of Sounds

       A vowel is considered to be in its strong position when it’s in a stressed syllable, in the weak position when it’s in unstressed syllables.

       A consonant is considered to be in its strong position when it stands before vowels and in intervocalic position, in the weak position when it is at the end of the word or one consonant is preceded by another.

       There are different methods of establishing the phonemic status of speech sounds in weak positions.

       The scientists of the so-called morphological school represented by Peter Savvich Kuznetsov (February 1, 1899 – March 21, 1968), Ruben Ivanovich Avanesov (February 14, 1902 – May 1, 1982), V. P. Sviridov, M. V Panov supported the idea of neutralization, which is said to occur when two or more closely related sounds which are in contrast with each other in most positions are found to be non-contrastive in certain other positions.

       The scientists of this school supported the idea that the alternations are observed in one and the same context (morphological unit). In other words, in the morpheme. They came to the conclusion that the phonemic content of the morpheme is constant.

       The Leningrad phonological school (Leo Ziner (December 26, 1903, Saint-Petersburg — 1995, Saint-Petersburg), Margarita Ivanovna Matusevitch (1885—1979)) assert that the phoneme is independent of the morpheme. They think that a morpheme can’t lose any of its distinctive features. If we compare the stressed and the unstressed position of the phoneme, we can say that the sounds belong to different phonemes.

The Prague phonological school introduced a new unit which is broader than a phoneme. It was named archiphoneme. It combines the distinctive features of two different phonemes. The archiphoneme consists of shared features of two or more closely related phonemes, but excludes the features which distinguish them. The archiphoneme {b-p} is plosive, but excludes the features of voicing. It differentiates them.