Elena Simonato1; 1 University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Discussion
The current paper presents an attempt to analyse the rise of social phonetics based on the study of the language of intelligentsia begun by Evgenij Polivanov (1891-1937) in the early 1930’s.In his works on social linguistics, Polivanov stresses the influence of social life on the language. But he emphasises that social and economical facts have no direct impact on language evolution, phonetical evolution in particular. He claimes that the main reason for language evolution lies in “economical and political changes that modify the contingent of speakers, or «social substrate. Polivanov insists that language only exists as a social phenomenon, and that the science of language needs to study its object exclusively in this way. Polivanov openes there a new field of linguistic research which he calls «social and dialectal phonetics». His field of investigation concerns first of all the language of big Soviet Russian-speaking cities. Polivanov makes a linguistic portrait of a Russian intellectual. Features of the intellectual pronunciation are:- combinations ‘hard consonant + [e]’
