[unchecked]

Counterpart

Feature System

Definition

The feature [unchecked] is produced with little to no restriction, or checking, by a constriction or blockage by the glottis for airflow, and hence the sound. Often possessing long terminations that fade with time rather than being terminated abruptly (Jakobson, Fant & Halle 1952:21). This leads to these sounds having a lower rate of discharge over a longer time interval and a higher damping of the sounds.

Purpose

The [unchecked] feature existed primarily to be the opposition to the [checked] feature, and encompassed most unglottalized sounds.

History

These features were first introduced by Jakobson, Fant, & Halle (1952:21) as one of several envelope features. The [checked] and [unchecked] features were considered to be quite common and said to be found in many native languages of the America’s, Africa, and East Asia (Jakobson, Fant & Halle 1952: 21).

[unchecked] and its counterpart were excluded from The Sound Pattern of English system of phonological features, and fell out of common use as the SPE features came into prominence. It is largely considered obsolete and is no longer in common usage.
Clements-Halle (1983) proposes the feature [constricted], in reference to the glottis. It is characteristic of the implosives and ejectives, among others. While not the same as [checked]/[unchecked] the [constr] feature takes on some of the utility that this pair once had.

References

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

Halle, Morris; and George N. Clements. 1983. Problem book in phonology: A workbook for courses in introductory linguistics and modern phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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.

Jakobson, Roman; and Morris Halle. 1956. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton.

Author

Michael Boehmcke