[round]

Counterpart

[-round]

Feature System

Definition

Chomsky & Halle (1968) define [rounded] sounds as vowels being “produced with a narrowing of the lip orifice,” (Chomsky & Halle 1968:309). These sounds are often, but not obligatorily, associated with the feature [back]. The correlated designation for consonants is labialization (Chomsky & Halle 1968:309). See [labial].

Purpose

The feature [rounded] is used in SPE to distinguish front unrounded and rounded vowels; e.g., Turkish /i/ from /ü/ (IPA /y/). In Hyman’s analysis of dialect B of Igbo, /bè/ ‘cut’ is reduplicated in dialect A with /i/: [òbìbè], but between labial consonants as [òbùbè] ‘cutting’ (1975:53).

History

Although [round] now possesses an articulatory basis, its idea was introduced in Preliminaries in 1952 via the opposition [flat]/[plain]. Jakobson, Fant, and Halle described this opposition acoustically, saying the “flattening manifests itself by a downward shift of a set of formants or even all of the formants in the spectrum,” (Jakobson et al., 1952:31). Although articulation and production are not what Jakobson and his colleagues use to define [flat]/[plain], they note that [flat] phonemes are generally produced by a “reduction of the lip orifice (rounding) with a concomitant increase in the length of the lip constriction,” (Jakobson et al., 1952:31).

The feature [round] was introduced as an articulatory feature by Chomsky & Halle in SPE as a cavity feature, alongside [coronal], [anterior], [high], [low], [back], [distributed], [covered], glottal constrictions, [nasal], and [lateral]. Roundness has been used regularly since its introduction and is a productive descriptor for vowels.

Later on, the feature [labial] became used as a way of capturing the interaction between labialized consonants and rounded vowels. Hyman discusses the feature specification [+labial] as being a “‘cover feature’ for labial and labialized consonants as well as rounded vowels” (Hyman 1975:53-54).

References

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

Hyman, Larry. 1975. Phonology: Theory and analysis. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Jakobson, Roman; Gunnar Fant; and Morris Halle. 1952. Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates. (MIT Acoustic Laboratory Technical Report 13). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Author

Ainsley Graf