Feature

Counterpart

n/a

Feature System

Definition

The smallest unit of sound, the atom of sound. One of a very limited set of the ultimate underlying distinctions of oppositions within the sound system of human language. Oppositions are usually thought of in binary terms of + or – values. For example, in a speech sound, the vocal folds are either vibrating, as in /z/ or are not, as in /s/. This opposition is represented by the feature [voiced], so /z/ is [+voiced], while /s/ is [-voiced]. Both sounds also share other features such as [+consonantal] (since both are consonants), and [+continuant], since as fricatives, they have a continuous airflow during their production. Also known as distinctive feature or phonological feature.

Purpose

To cross-classify the oppositions of sounds within language and to capture natural classes of sounds that pattern together. A strong feature theory also disallows formalism of unnatural classes of sounds (sounds which never pattern together). The ultimate goal is to form a model of sound in the phonological component of the mind in human language.

History

Phonologists have long known that certain sounds pattern together with other sounds to form natural classes. For example, in the history of Germanic languages, the voiceless stops p,t, k became fricative f, θ, x. The set /p, t, k/ also undergo aspiration at the beginning of stressed syllables in English, e.g. pit [pʰɪt], and those same sounds are also often pre-glottalized at the end of a syllable, as in hip [hɪˀt]. It therefore became expedient to look for ways in which sounds grouped together in oppositions. The most detailed modern exposition of oppositions was offered by Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1939) of the Prague School of linguistics. This work, while recognizing that segments contained subsegmental components, did not sketch out a formal theory of phonological features. This fell to Roman Jakobson and his colleagues, who proposed what became known as Jakobsonian features (Jakobson & Lotz 1949, Jakobson 1949, Jakobson, Fant & Halle 1952, Jakobson & Halle 1956). The small feature set proposed, involving some twelve oppositions, was defined primarily in acoustic terms, though articulatory equivalents followed.

An articulator-based set of definitions was offered by Chomsky and Halle (1968) in their landmark work, The sound pattern of English (SPE), which retained some Jakobsonian features, but proposed many new ones, also aiming to capture all possible phonetic distinctions made by the languages of the world. In subsequent years, the set of SPE features was gradually modified, especially in the area of tone. However, many scholars wished to enrich the subsegmental representation of features into a hierarchical arrangement known as feature geometry (Halle 1983, 1988, 1992, 2003, Clements 1985, Sagey 1986, Clements & Hume 1995).

At the same time, the binary presupposition of at least some features was questioned. Phonologists have also grappled with the tension between gradient, physical phonetics and the categorial nature of phonological features. More recent work has examined whether features are an innate part of Universal Grammar, or whether they are emergent during language learning (Mielke 2008). And a related issue is the failure of any feature theory to capture all the classes involved in some phonological rules.

References

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

Clements, George N. 1985. The geometry of phonological features. Phonology Yearbook 2.223-252.

Clements, G.N.; and Elizabeth V. Hume. 1995. The internal organization of speech sounds. The handbook of phonological theory, ed. by John Goldsmith, 245-306. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Halle, Morris. 1983. On distinctive features and their articulatory implementation. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1.91-105.

Halle, Morris. 1988. The immanent form of phonemes. Giving birth to cognitive science: A Festschrift for George A. Miller, ed. by William Hurst, 167-183. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Halle, Morris. 1992. Phonological features. Oxford international encyclopedia of linguistics, vol. 3, ed. by William Bright, 207-212. New York: Oxford University Press.

Halle, Morris. 2003. Phonological features. Oxford international encyclopedia of linguistics, vol. 3, ed. by William Frawley, 314-320. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jakobson, Roman. 1949. On the identification of phonemic entities. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague5.205-213. Reprinted in 1962 in Selected writings: Vol. 1: Phonological studies, ed. by Roman Jakobson, 418-425. ’S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

Jakobson, Roman; C. Gunnar M. Fant; and Morris Halle. 1952. Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates. M.I.T. Acoustics Laboratory Technical report No. 13 (preface written in December 1952). 2nd revised edition, May 1952. 3rd. edn unchanged except for the addition of eight references, Sept. 1961, printed by MIT Press. 4th edn., unchanged except for the addition of the Supplement by Jakobson & Halle “Tenseness and Laxness”, Aug. 1963. 6th printing, 1965. 7th printing, 1967.

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

Mielke, Jeff. 2008. The emergence of distinctive features. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sagey, Elizabeth. 1986. The representation of features and relations in nonlinear phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. Published in 1991 by Garland Press.

Trubetzkoy, Nikolai S. 1939. Grundzüge der Phonologie. Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague 7. Trans. 1969 by Christiane Baltaxe, Principles of phonology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Author

Paul D. Fallon