[diluted]

Definition

The production of [diluted] sounds involves a narrowed oral cavity and increased volume of the pharyngeal cavity. However, Jakobson focused on characterizing [diluted] sounds by their opposition to [saturated] sounds, instead of providing a thorough investigation of [diluted] as its own feature. 

[diluted] sounds are identifiable due to their lower energy and a characterization of loosely composed, widely separated formants, of particular note in the deepest parts of the lower formant (Jakobson & Lotz 1949:427).

Purpose

Dresher notes that, within the Jakobsonian feature system, “front coronals and labials are [–saturation], and postalveolars /ʃ, ʒ/ and velars /k, g/ are [+saturation]. The [+saturated] consonants are divided by [tensity] and [continuousness]; this analysis does not distinguish post-alveolars from velars, but mixes the [+saturated] segments together”¹ (2018:13).

As such, [saturated] and [diluted] united a broad range of phonemes that do not make a natural class, and this is acknowledged in Jakobson & Lotz 1949 as they note, “Thus the difference between velar and palatal is irrelevant in French phonemics …The advanced articulation of k g before j or i, as well as the existence of ŋ instead of ɲ before w, … illustrates the unity of the saturated consonants in French (1949:428).”

This choice may explain why [saturated] and [diluted] had been dropped from use by the publication of Jakobson, Fant, & Halle’s (1952) “Preliminaries to speech analysis.”

History

First introduced by Jakobson & Lotz (1949:427-431), in the first Jakobsonian Feature System, which defined the distinctive features of the thirty-six French phonemes.

Jakobson and his colleagues appear to have already begun to eliminate [saturated] and [diluted] from their distinctive features by 1952, in favor of more specific features that described various states of higher and lower energy sound patterns, instead of the more generic and less descriptive [saturated] and [diluted].

Both [diluted] and its counterpart were excluded from the proposed features in The sound pattern of English, and fell out of common use as the SPE feature system came into prominence. It is largely considered obsolete and is no longer in common usage.

References

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

Dresher, B. Elan. 2018. Contrastive feature hierarchies in Old English diachronic phonology. Transactions of the Philological Society 116.1-29.

Jakobson, Roman; and John Lotz. 1949. Notes on the French phonemic pattern. Word 5.151-158. Reprinted in Jakobson (1962: 426-434).

Jakobson, Roman. 1962. Selected writings: Vol. 1: Phonological studies. ’S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

Jakobson, Roman, Gunnar Fant & Morris Halle. 1952. Preliminaries to speech analysis: the distinctive features and their correlates. (MIT Acoustic Laboratory Technical Report 13). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Further Reading

Goldsmith, John A. (ed.) 1995. The handbook of phonological theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Author

Michael Boehmcke

1. [1] The usage in this paragraph of (+/-) saturation is anachronistic, as [+saturation] would have just been referred to as saturation and [-saturation] would be referred to as dilution. The feature has been placed into brackets for this article for clarity, and the [+/- saturation] notation has been retained in the quote for the same purpose. ↩︎