[voiceless]

Counterpart

Feature System

Definition

Phonemes classified as [voiceless] are “produced with a glottal opening that is so wide that it prevents vocal vibration if air flows through the opening” (Chomsky & Halle 1968:327).

Purpose

The opposition of [voiceless] with [voice] demonstrates how physical differences in the vocal tract manifest acoustically (Jakobson 1949:422).

History

The opposition [voice] and [voiceless] was introduced by Jakobson and Lotz (1949) not as distinctive features but as descriptors of the [tense] vs. [lax] opposition. “The tense consonants (vs. lax) demand not only stiffened walls but also a stronger airstream: they are fortes vs. lenes. The fortes, when not followed by lenes, are voiceless, and the lenes, except before fortes, are voiced” (Jakobson & Lotz 1949:430).

The opposition between [voiced] and [voiceless] were introduced as distinctive features in 1952 by Jakobson, Fant, & Halle. They called [voice] phonemes “buzz” phonemes and [voiceless] phonemes “hiss” phonemes. They note that the “most striking manifestation of ‘voicing’ is the appearance of a strong low component which is represented by the voice bar along the base line of the spectrogram” (Jakobson et al. 1952:26).

Lombardi (1991) argues that laryngeal features are privative because phonological rules do not tend to target [-voice], given the assumptions of underspecification in phonological derivations and neutralization outputs (Lombardi 1991:2-3). For some scholars, [-voice] or [voiceless] is obsolete, being simply in the laryngeal node in feature geometry and having no dependent features (Lombardi 1991:35).

References

Chomsky, Noam; and Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row.

Jakobson, Roman. 1949. On the identification of phonemic entities. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague 5.205-213. Reprinted in 1962 in Selected writings: Vol. 1: Phonological studies, ed. by Roman Jakobson, 418-425. ’S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

Jakobson, Roman; and John Lotz. 1949. Notes on the French phonemic pattern. Word 5.151-158. Reprinted in 1962 in Selected writings: Vol. 1: Phonological studies, ed. by Roman Jakobson, 426-434. ’S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

Jakobson, Roman; Gunnar Fant; and Morris Halle. 1952. Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates. (MIT Acoustic Laboratory Technical Report 13). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lombardi, Linda. 1991. Laryngeal features and laryngeal neutralization. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. [Published by Garland, New York, 1994.]

Author

Ainsley Graf