[nasal]

Counterpart

Feature System

Definition

A feature assigned to sounds produced with a lowered velum (soft palate), allowing airflow through the nasal cavity. This contrasts with sounds where the velum is raised, and airflow is directed solely through the oral cavity.

Purpose

As a binary distinctive feature, nasality supports phonemic opposition in many languages, especially among both consonants and vowels.

History

In the original 1949 notes on French phonemic patterns, Jakobson & Lotz identifies nasality as one of six binary phonemic oppositions, contrasting nasal with oral. He defines this feature as a binary opposition: nasal vs. non-nasal (or oral). In his epigraph, he uses /+m/ & /+n/ to represent nasal phonemes in French. (Jakobson & Lotz 1949) Jakobson, Halle, and Fant (1952 [1965] 39), expanded on this concept by noting that nasality can apply to both vowels and consonants. In English, minimal pairs such as “din” vs. “did” illustrate how nasality can distinguish meaning in consonants. Similarly, in French, words like banc [bench] and bas ‘low’ illustrate vowel nasality. These nasal segments correspond to [oral] stops, such as /m/ with /b/ and /n/ with /d/.The sound pattern of English (SPE) also discusses the [nasal]/[non-nasal] distinction, noting that /m/ and /n/ are the most common nasal consonants in English. In French, nasality is often superimposed on vowels, as shown in the example branlant (shaking), which contains two nasal vowels. Keating (1988) notes in her index that there were no major changes to the treatment of nasality in phonological theory during the 20th century. However, Stephen R. Anderson, in his work on 20th-century phonology, discusses early developments such as the Leipzig School’s announcement of a relationship between the nasal /n/ and the vowel /a/. In English, there are three phonemic nasal consonants: /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/, as illustrated in the triplet ram, ran, rang. These examples highlight the phonemic contrast created by nasality in both historical and contemporary phonological theory.

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.

Halle, Morris, Roman Jakobson & Gunnar Fant. 1952. Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jakobson, Roman. 2002 [1949]. On the identification of phonemic entities. In Phonological studies, 419–425. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Keating, Patricia A. 1988. Underspecification in phonetics. Phonology 5(2). 275–292. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675700002395

Author

Bex Colley