Secondary Consonantal Source Features 

Definition

Secondary Consonantal Source features are a class of features that include two types: (1) two features from the primary source: (a) Envelope Features, and (b) Stridency; and (2) Voicing due to a supplementary source (Jakobson, Fant, and Halle 1952: 21).

Envelope Features refer to the “temporal envelope of sound intensity”–the speech power average over 0.02 seconds as a function of time, with smooth and rough envelopes. The Envelope features include [Interrupted/Continuant], which distinguishes stops from fricatives, and [Checked/Unchecked], which distinguishes ejectives and other sounds with compression or closure of the glottis from nonglottalized sounds. 

The feature Strident (vs. Mellow) characterizes sibilants and was used to mark most affricates. The feature Voiced superimposes a harmonic sound source on the noise source.

Purpose

After distinguishing the major classes of vowel and consonant through the Fundamental Source Features, the Secondary Consonantal Source features provide additional information on the acoustic characteristics of sounds, characteristics that result from envelope features, stridency, and voicing.

A fully specified sample of sounds for the Secondary Consonantal Source Features

	a	ʃ	tʃ	k	kʼ	ɡ
Continuant	+	+	–	–	–	–
Checked	–	–	–	–	+	–
Strident	–	+	+	–	–	–
Voiced	+	–	–	–	–	+

History

The term “secondary consonantal source features” was introduced by Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1952:21). Jakobson & Halle (1956) later grouped as Sonority Features the major class features Vocalic and Consonantal, and included Secondary Consonantal Source Features Continuant, Checked, Strident/Mellow, and Voiced, along with Compact/Diffuse, Tense/Lax, and Nasal as the nine sonority features. Preliminaries opposed Secondary Consonantal Features (Interrupted/Continuant, Checked/Unchecked, Strident/Mellow, and Voiced/Unvoiced) to Fundamental Source Features (Vocalic and Consonantal) and to Resonance Features (Compact/Diffuse, Grave/Acute, Flat/Plain, Sharp/Plain, Tense/Lax, and Nasal/Oral).

With the shift towards an articulatory description as primary in Chomsky & Halle (1968), there was little to hold Secondary Consonantal Source Features together as a classificatory group and the classification became obsolete.

References

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

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.

Jakobson, Roman and Morris Halle. 1956. Phonology and phonetics. Part I of Fundamentals of Language (Janua Linguarum, 1), 1-51. ’S-Gravenhage: Mouton.

Further Reading

Author

Paul D. Fallon