[back]

Counterpart

Feature System

Definition

The feature [back] describes phonemes that result from retracting the body of the tongue from the neutral position, which is both raised and fronted, approximately English [ε] as in bed (Chomsky & Halle 1968:304-305).

Purpose

The feature [back] helps to “characterize the placement of the body of the tongue” (Chomsky & Halle 1968:304). This feature separates uvulars and pharyngeals from other segments, and it describes central and back vowels apart from front vowels.

Russian has a rule of retraction (backing) that occurs between a prefix and stem. When the phoneme /i/ follows a hard consonant, such as /t͏ˠ/, it retracts to [ɨ]. For example, the underlying /ot͏ˠ inˠsˠtˠitˠutˠa/ ‘from the institute’ is realized as [ot͏ˠ ɨnˠsˠtˠitˠutˠa] in speech Rubach 2000:42-44).

History

The distinctive feature [back] was introduced by Chomsky and Halle (1968) to describe tongue body placement alongside [high] and [low]. They label palatals as [-back] and velars, uvulars, and pharyngeals as [+back] (Chomsky & Halle 1968:304-305).

The distinction [+back] has been historically used to describe central vowels as well as back vowels. The difference between central and true back vowels comes down to the assignment of [-round] to true back vowels. Morén-Duolljá (2011) argues that [round] is not a vowel-only feature, but rather some other classifier, leaving tongue position as the main feature to describe vowels. This introduces the need for a feature such as [front] in order to handle central and back rounded vowels (Morén-Duolljá 2011:447-448).

References

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

Morén-Duolljá, Bruce. 2011. Vowel place. The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, vol. 1: General issues and segmental phonology, ed. by Marc van Oostendorp Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren Rice, 440–464. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Rice, Keren. 2002. Vowel place contrasts. Language universals and variation, ed. by Mengistu, Amberber, and Peter Collins, 239-269. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Rubach, Jerzy. 2000. Backness switch in Russian. Phonology 17.39-64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Author

Ainsley Graf