[voice]

Counterpart

Feature System

Definition

The feature [voice] is used to describe sounds that are made when the vocal tract is in a neutral position and the vocal cords vibrate as air moves through them (Chomsky & Halle 1968:326-327).

Purpose

The feature [voice] is used to demonstrate how physical differences in the vocal tract manifest acoustically. “[T]he glottis can be closed to a greater or lesser degree; the vibrations of the vocal cords can be of different amplitude; and the phase at which they begin can cease or vary. Thus, the glottis is capable of producing diverse nuances in the matter of consonantal voicing, but only the opposition ‘presence vs. absence of voicing’ is utilized to differentiate word meanings” (Jakobson 1949:422-423).

History

The features [voice] and [voiceless] were introduced by Jakobson and Lotz in 1949, though not as distinctive features. They were used to describe the [tense] vs. [lax] opposition. “The tense consonants (vs. lax) demand not only stiffened walls but also a stronger airstream: they are fortes vs. lenes. The fortes, when not followed by lenes, are voiceless, and the lenes, except before fortes, are voiced” (Jakobson & Lotz 1949:430).

Both [voiced] and [voiceless] were introduced as oppositional distinctive features in 1952 by Jakobson, Fant, and Halle. They called [voice] phonemes “buzz” phonemes and [voiceless] phonemes “hiss” phonemes. They note that the “most striking manifestation of ‘voicing’ is the appearance of a strong low component which is represented by the voice bar along the base line of the spectrogram” (Jakobson et al. 1952:26).

Lombardi (1991) argues that laryngeal features are privative because phonological rules do not tend to target [-voice], given the assumptions of underspecification in phonological derivations and neutralization outputs (Lombardi 1991:2-3). For some scholars, [-voice] or [voiceless] is obsolete, being simply in the laryngeal node in feature geometry and having no dependent features (Lombardi 1991:35).

References

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

Jakobson, Roman. 1949. On the identification of phonemic entities. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague 5.205-213. Reprinted in 1962 in Selected writings: Vol. 1: Phonological studies, ed. by Roman Jakobson, 418-425. ’S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

Jakobson, Roman; and John Lotz. 1949. Notes on the French phonemic pattern. Word 5.151-158. Reprinted in 1962 in Selected writings: Vol. 1: Phonological studies, ed. by Roman Jakobson, 426-434. ’S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

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

Lombardi, Linda. 1991. Laryngeal features and laryngeal neutralization. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. [Published by Garland, New York, 1994.]

Author

Ainsley Graf