[compact]

Counterpart

[diffuse]

Feature System

Definition

The feature [compact] is a phonological feature used to describe speech sounds with a concentration of acoustic energy in the central frequency region. It is typically associated with low vowels and posterior consonants such as velars and palatals. Articulatorily, compact sounds often result from a shorter pharynx or a larger front-to-back cavity ratio. Perceptually, they tend to have greater prominence due to the focused energy during production. “Compactness has been used to separate the low vowels [+compact] from the mid and high vowels [-compact]” McCawley (1967:524).

Purpose

It helps to explain the perceptual and articulatory patterns across languages by distinguishing sounds based on where their acoustic energy was concentrated.

History

The feature [compact] originates in the Jakobsonian feature system. It was introduced as one of a small set of binary features used to describe both consonants and vowels (Jakobson, Halle, & Fant, 1968). In this model, ‘compactness’ described a universal contrast between sounds with energy concentrated in the center of the acoustic spectrum for example, /k g ʃ ŋ a/ and those with more dispersed spectral energy e.g. /p t i u/. Jakobson originally referred to this contrast in terms of [saturated] and [diluted] sounds (Jakobson, 1949), but later work formalized the terms as [compact] and [diffuse]. McCawley (1979:523) proposed an alternative to the [compact]/[diffuse] framework by suggesting that the feature [high] could replace compactness. He proposed [+high] to group high vowels and dorsal consonants (velars and palatals), while [-high] to group low and mid vowels with labial, dental, and alveolar consonants. To decide between the two approaches, McCawley argued that the choice should depend on whether phonological rules in the world’s languages treat vowels and consonants as a single class. For example, in cases of assimilation where a vowel and consonant affect each other systematically (McCawley 1979:523). In The sound pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968) followed McCawley’s direction and revised the feature system, effectively replacing [compact] in vowels with [high], [low], and [back], and in consonants with features like [anterior] and [back]. In this model, compactness was no longer needed as a standalone feature because the same distinctions could be made using a more articulatorily grounded set of features. The concept of compactness remains influential, especially in discussions of acoustic salience and cross-linguistic feature patterns (Anderson 2021).

References

Anderson, Stephen R. 2021. Phonology in the twentieth century: Second edition, revised and expanded. Berlin: Language Science Press. (History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 5). Anderson, Stephen R. 2021. Phonology in the twentieth century: Second edition, revised and expanded. Berlin: Language Science Press. (History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 5).

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

Ferguson, Charles A. 1962. Review of The sound pattern of Russian: A linguistic and acoustical investigation by Morris Halle. Language 38(3). 284–298. https://www.jstor.org/stable/410790

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

Halle, Morris. 1959. The sound pattern of Russian, with an excursus on the contextual variants of the Russian vowels by Lawrence G. Jones. (Description and analysis of Contemporary Standard Russian, vol. 1). The Hague: Mouton.
https://web.mit.edu/morrishalle/pubworks/papers/1959_Halle_The_Sound_Pattern_of_Russian.pdf

McCawley, James D. 1979. The role of a system of phonological features in a theory of language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Mielke, Jeff. 2011. Distinctive features. In Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J.
Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren Rice (eds.), The Blackwell Companion
to Phonology, vol. 1, 131–157. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Author

Bex Colley