[strident]

Counterpart

Feature System

Definition

A feature of certain obstruents characterized by high acoustic intensity and
irregular, noisy waveforms, resulting from turbulent airflow striking the
surface at a steep angle.

Purpose

The feature [strident] distinguishes a particular class of fricatives and
affricates that are acoustically more intense or “noisy” due to their articulatory
properties. Sounds categorized as [+strident] are produced with greater
frictional noise. The feature helps to distinguish high-intensity fricatives (like
[s], [ʃ], [z], [ʒ]) and affricates (like [tʃ], [dʒ]) from lower-intensity ones (like
[f], [θ], [x], [h]).

History

The phonological feature [strident] has undergone significant refinement since
its initial proposal in Jakobson, Halle, and Font (1952 [1965: 23-25) It is first
introduced to distinguish between plosives and affricates, classifying plosives
as [-strident] and affricates as [+strident] based on their more turbulent
release. However, this application proved inadequate for capturing
distinctions among other manners of articulation, such as [nasals] (Anderson
2021: 146).
In The sound pattern of English (SPE) (Chomsky and Halle 1968;1991), the
feature was expanded to describe fricatives and affricates more broadly,
identifying [+strident] sounds like sibilants, labiodentals, and uvulars as
acoustically [noisy] in contrast to the [mellow] [-strident] fricatives such as
bilabials, dentals, and palatals.
Clements and Halle (1983: 7) give a more phonetically grounded view,
defining strident sounds as sounds produced with a complex constriction that
forces the airstream against two surfaces, generating high-intensity fricative
noise, and limiting the feature to fricatives and affricates. Keating (1988),
building on work by Halle and Stevens (1979) and Shadle (1985), retained the
acoustic basis of the feature, but noted the alternative label [grooved] to
reflect the tongue shape involved in producing sibilants. Keating 1988
emphasized that [strident] was useful for capturing natural classes of fricatives
relevant to phonological processes, such as English plural formation, though it
could not adequately distinguish place features in non-fricative manners.
Goldsmith (1995), noted that while [strident] traditionally applied to a broad
range of sounds including [labiodentals] and [uvulars], some scholars have
proposed restricting it to coronals, raising issues for languages like Ewe that
contrast bilabial and labiodental fricatives.

Goldsmith also observed that stridency is generally unaffected by place
assimilation, supporting the view that it should be linked under the root node
of a segment’s feature geometry. Despite terminological and theoretical
variation over time, [strident] remains a central feature in phonological theory,
representing both articulatory complexity and acoustic intensity in the
classification of fricatives and affricates.
Clements (2015) notes that there is controversy surrounding the use of
[+strident] to distinguish sibilant affricates from nonsibilant stops. One
proposal to help with this use of [+strident] is the feature [delayed release].
The reason behind this proposal comes from the existence of contrasts
between sibilant and no-sibilant affricates. In the Athabaskan language Dëné
Słiné (Chipewyan) has a phonemic distinction among three series of anterior
coronals sounds: plain stops such as [t], nonsibilant affricates such as [tθ], and
sibilant affricates such as [ts].

References

Anderson, Stephen R. 1985. Phonology in the twentieth century: Theories of
rules and theories of representations. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Chomsky, Noam & Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New
York: Harper & Row.
Clements, G. N. 2015. Features in phonology and phonetics: Posthumous
writings by Nick Clements and coauthors, ed. by Annie Rialland, Rachid
Ridouane, and Harry van der Hulst. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Goldsmith, John A. 1995. The handbook of phonological theory. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Halle, Morris, Roman Jakobson & Gunnar Fant. 1952. Preliminaries to
speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Jakobson, Roman. 1949. On the identification of phonemic entities. In
Selected writings, vol. 1, 233–240. The Hague: Mouton.
Keating, Patricia A. 1988. Underspecification in phonetics. Phonology 5(2).
275–292. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675700002395

Author

Bex Colley