Prosodic Features

Counterpart

Feature System

Definition

Prosodic Features include elements of speech such as length, accent, tone, intonation, pitch, etc. that aid in the phonetic and phonological description of sounds (Fox 2023:2).

History

There was some work in the early phonological feature literature discussing intonation and/or pitch, with the first explicit introduction to Prosodic Features being in Jakobson, Fant, and Halle’s Preliminaries, where they divided distinctive features into two classes: inherent and prosodic (1952:13).

In SPE, Chomsky and Halle present seven prosodic features–stress, pitch, high tone, low tone, elevated tone, rising tone, falling tone, concave tone, and length (Chomsky & Halle 1968:300). Despite their explicit recognition of the features, they fail to elaborate on the feature set, citing only Wang (1967) as a potential resource for preliminary information. They note that their investigations of these features “had not progressed,” (Chomsky & Halle 1968:329). In his paper, Phonological features of tone, William S-Y. Wang explores tonal features and their phonetic representations and interpretations. However, tone is the only prosodic feature that is discussed, and it is not recognized as a specifically prosodic feature. Chomsky and Halle do not address tone in SPE.

Despite their neglect of prosodic features, they make extensive use of [stress]. On page 22, they conceive of at least five degrees of phonetic stress (plus unstressed elements); their analysis including compound stress ultimately denotes three degrees of stress (Chomsky & Halle 1968). In their table of vowels on page 176, [length] is implied by the use of the macron (ī vs. i, along with eight other long vowels), but the distinctive feature used is [tense] (ibid.).

In his 1973 textbook, Generative phonology, Sanford Schane addresses prosodic features in greater depth than in SPE. He names three prosodic features–stress, pitch, and length–and says that prosodic elements are “usually associated with the syllable, and most often with a particular vowel,” (Schane 1973:14). He boils stress down to loudness, pitch to intonation, and length to timing; he provides elementary examples but does not elaborate any more than that (ibid.)

To this day, the nature of prosody itself is highly debated within the field. In his 2023 book, Anthony Fox explores the linguistic description of prosodic features. He notes that the word itself is derived from Greek prosodía, which signifies song sung to music or sung accompaniment (Fox 2023:1). The main prosodic features are generally understood to be length, accent, tone, and intonation and can be analyzed both phonetically (as a result of laryngeal and/or subglottal activity) and phonologically (as secondary, or as modifications to segments; Fox 2023:3-5).

References

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

Fox, Anthony. 2023. Prosodic features and prosodic structure: The phonology of ‘suprasegmentals’. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schane, Sanford A. 1973. Generative phonology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Wang, William S-Y. 1967. Phonological features of tone. In International Journal of American Linguistics 33.93-105.

Author

Ainsley Graf