Resonance Features

Definition

Resonance Features are a class of features that include three features the classify sounds generated in the basic resonator: (1) Compactness; (2) the three Tonality Features (a) Grave/Acute, (b) Flat/Plain, (c) Sharp/Plain; and (3) Tense/Lax, and, due to a supplementary source that creates resonance in the nasal cavity, the feature Nasal (Jakobson, Fant, and Halle 1952: 39-40).

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. 

Purpose

After distinguishing the major classes of vowel and consonant through the Fundamental Source Features, and with the Secondary Consonantal Source features providing additional information on the acoustic characteristics of sounds, the Resonance features focus on the particular resonant properties of the vocal tract.

A fully specified sample of sounds for the Resonance Features:

	a	i	p	m
Compact	+	–	–	–
Grave	+	–	+	+
Flat	–	–	–	–
Sharp	–	–	–	–
Tense	–	+	+	–
Nasal	–	–	–	+

History

The term “Resonance Features” was introduced by Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1952:26). Jakobson & Halle (1956) later proposed a two-part division of inherent features: tonality and sonority. Among the Sonority Features they included Preliminaries’ Fundamental Source features, Vocalic and Consonantal, and the Resonance Features Compact/Diffuse, Tense/Lax, Voiced, Nasal, Continuant, Strident/Mellow, and Checked.

The former Resonance features Grave/Acute, Flat/Plain, and Sharp/Plain were regrouped as the three Tonality features. 

Since Chomsky & Halle (1968) emphasized articulatory definitions of features, and retreated from the robust acoustic basis of the Jakobsonian features, many features were abandoned: Compact/Diffuse, Strident/Mellow, Checked, Grave/Acute, Flat/Plain, and Sharp/Plain. There was therefore little to hold Resonance Features and their Sonority 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