[oral]

Definition

The features [oral] or [non-nasalized] phonemes are formed when the air escapes from the larynx via the oral cavity only. During the production of [oral] sounds, the velum is raised to prevent air exiting through the nose (oral consonants and oral vowels versus nasal stops, nasalized glides, other nasal consonants, and nasalized vowels).

Purpose

To distinguish sounds based on if air passes through the nasal cavity or the oral cavity during articulation.

History

The feature [oral] evolved significantly across theoretical frameworks. In Jakobson’s 1949 work, [oral] is treated as one of six primary oppositions. However, it is not explicitly defined instead, it is understood as the absence of nasality. Jakobson, Halle, and Fant further note that the [oral/nasal] opposition is nearly universal for consonants, though many languages do not contrast nasal and oral vowels. In their view, oral is not a positively defined feature, but rather the unmarked or default value in a binary [±nasal] system. This treatment is echoed in Chomsky and Halle’s The sound pattern of English (SPE) (1968), where oral is not recognized as a separate feature, but simply as [–nasal]. They describe anterior nasal consonants like /n/ and /m/ as the most common and note that in languages like Yoruba and Nupe, nasality can be superimposed on glides, producing nasal variants of non-nasal phonemes such as /j/, /w/, and /ɾ/. In later models, such as those proposed by Clements and Hume (1995), [oral] begins to take on more defined structure within feature geometry, and in Anderson’s Phonology in the twentieth century (1985), [oral] is used descriptively for classifying sounds (e.g., oral stops) rather than as an independent distinctive feature.

Goldsmith (1995) discusses oral tract place features like labial, coronal, and dorsal, and references McCarthy’s idea that these form an independent constituent called “orals,” which stands as a sister to pharyngeal. Clements & Hume (1995) elaborate that if nasal is treated as a privative feature, then oral segments are inherently unspecified for nasality; they do not need to be marked as [–nasal], as their lack of [+nasal] is sufficient. This reflects a broader theoretical shift toward viewing oral not as an active, contrastive feature, but as the phonological default in the absence of nasality.

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.

Clements, G. N. & Elizabeth V. Hume. 1995. The internal organization of speech sounds. In John A. Goldsmith (ed.), The handbook of phonological theory, 245–306. Oxford: Blackwell.

Goldsmith, John. 1995. Features. In John A. Goldsmith (ed.), The handbook of phonological theory, 1–23, 107–147, 273. Oxford: Blackwell.

Jakobson, Roman. 1949. On the identification of phonemic entities. In Selected writings I: Phonological studies, 213–218. The Hague: Mouton.

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

Further Reading

Author

Bex Colley