[acute]

Counterpart

Feature System

Definition

The feature [acute] is formed by a contracted buccal resonator and expanded labial and pharyngeal orifices (Jakobson & Lotz 1949).

Acoustically, the [acute] feature is defined by the predominance of the upper register formant of the spectrum over the lower, especially to the detriment or elimination of the latter (Jakobson, Fant, & Halle 1952:29).

Purpose

The feature [grave] is used to distinguish between the front and back vowel sounds, with front vowels being higher pitched and therefore [acute], and back vowels generally having lower pitches, and thus being [grave].

Among consonants, the gravity feature distinguishes ‘peripheral’ consonants which are [grave], from ‘central’ consonants which are [acute]. Peripheral consonants are those which are articulated at the peripheries of the oral tract, namely labials and velars; central consonants include dentals, alveolars and palatals.

However, evidence for a natural class of ‘grave’ consonants was sparse as the feature united largely unrelated groups of sounds, such as back vowels and peripheral consonants.

History

First introduced by Jakobson and Lotz (1949:427-431), in the first Jakobsonian Feature System, which defined the distinctive features of the thirty-six French phonemes. Jakobson and Lotz note within the paper that only vocalic, or mixed vowels, actually occur, indicating that this proposed distinctive feature actually lacked a true distinctiveness (1949:429).

Both [grave] and [acute] were still used in Jakobson, Fant, & Halle (1952:29) despite the omission of some of their original contemporaries, indicating the continued desire to find distinction in phonemic sound based on the position of formants in the register.

The feature [acute] 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. Features previously described by [acute] were subsumed into the [back] feature in the SPE feature system (Chomsky & Halle 1968:306).

NOTE: Although Jakobson (1931/1962) used the terms flat, non-flat, grave, and acute (1962:224), Qu (2021:164-165) showed that in the translation from Czech to English, Jakobson took the opportunity to incorporate some anachronistic terms.

References

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

Jakobson, Roman. 1931. Z fonologie spisovné slovenštiny. Slovenská miscellanea, ed. by Josef Jirásek, and František Tichý, 155-163. Bratislava: Universum.

Jakobson, Roman. 1962. Phonemic notes on standard Slovak. Selected writings, vol. I: Phonological studies, 221-230. ‘S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

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

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.

Qu, Changliang. 2021. Roman Jakobson’s forgotten Czech articles on phonology: A case of avoiding anachronism in linguistic historiography. RUS: Revista de Literatura e Cultura Russa 12(19).154-170. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2317-4765.rus.2021.186465

Author

Michael Boehmcke.
Note by Paul Fallon