[mellow]

Counterpart

Feature System

Definition

A type of sound characterized by more regular waveforms, resulting in a smooth auditory quality. In spectrograms, mellow sounds often display black areas that form horizontal or vertical striations, reflecting their harmonic and stable nature.

Purpose

To classify consonants based on the intensity and turbulence of their articulation, particularly to distinguish smoother, less noisy sounds from more turbulent, noisy fricatives such as [f v s z ].

History

The feature [mellow] has a brief but notable place in the history of phonological theory, primarily associated with early distinctive feature systems developed by Roman Jakobson and colleagues. In Preliminaries to speech analysis (Jakobson, Fant & Halle 1952 [1965] 24–25]), [mellow] is introduced as part of a binary contrast with strident. This contrast is intended to describe the acoustic and articulatory difference between less turbulent and more turbulent sounds. Mellow consonants were characterized by a smoother, less noisy airstream release, in contrast to [strident] sounds which involved greater turbulence due to more complex constrictions. This distinction was used to differentiate [mellow] vs [strident] pairs such as bilabials vs. labiodentals, non-sibilant dentals and palatals vs. hissing and hushing sibilants, and velars vs. uvular’s (Jakobson, Fant & Halle 1952 [1965] 25]). Jakobson, Fant, Halle (1952), also applied this contrast to affricates, which were described as strident stops, while plain plosives were labeled as mellow stops (Jakobson et al. 1952:24). The feature [mellow] thus served to distinguish affricates from non-affricated stops by their release properties, i.e. the presence or absence of accompanying fricative noise. In some languages, mellow plays a distinctive phonological role; for example, in Portuguese, the opposition between voiced stops and voiced fricatives in intervocalic position was argued to rest solely on the feature [mellow], rendering the [stop] [continuant] distinction redundant (Jakobson et al. 1952] 25). Despite its early usage, [mellow] did not survive into later feature theories. In The sound pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968), the feature was abandoned in favor of a more explicit binary matrix model, in which each feature was marked [+] or [−]. The binary opposition strident/mellow was reinterpreted as [+strident] vs. [−strident], effectively eliminating the term mellow from the formal feature inventory (Berns 2016:144). In SPE, affricates were analyzed as [-continuant, +strident] rather than being described through a distinct [mellow] label. Later phonological works, such as Keating (1988), make no mention of mellow, and the term has largely fallen out of use in modern generative phonology. However, it occasionally appears in historical discussions or comparative frameworks.

References

Berns, Janine. 2016. The phonological representation of affricates. Language and Linguistics Compass 10.3.142–156. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12179

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

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

Keating, Patricia A. 1988. Underspecification in phonetics. Phonology 5(2). 275–292. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675700002395

Author

Bex Colley