Fundamental Source Features
Counterpart
Resonance Features, Secondary Consonantal Features
Feature System
Definition
Fundamental source features correspond to what today are usually called major class features. Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1952) posited two such features: Vocalic/Nonvocalic and Consonantal/Nonconsonantal. The feature Vocalic applies to vowels, which bear no consonantal features. The feature Consonantal applies to consonants without vocalic properties. Liquids are complex segments bearing properties of both vowels and consonants. The glottal /h/ and word boundary lack both features.
| a | i | l | m | b | h | # | |
| Vocalic/ NonVocalic | + | + | + | – | – | – | – |
| Consonantal/ Nonconsonantal | – | – | + | + | + | – | – |
Purpose
The Fundamental Source Features are always listed first in a feature matrix. The features capture the two questions which must first be answered regarding the nature of the segment–is it vowel-like, and is it consonant-like? These can then lead the analyst to determine the distinctive features which must be specified, and those which are not relevant for further feature specification.
History
The term “fundamental source features” was introduced by Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1952:18). Jakobson & Halle (1956) later grouped Vocalic, Consonantal, along with Compact/Diffuse, Tense/Lax, Voiced/Voiceless, Nasal, Discontinuous/Continuant, Strident/Mellow, and Checked as the nine sonority features. Preliminaries opposed Fundamental Source Features to Secondary Consonantal Features (Interrupted/Continuant, Checked/Unchecked, Strident/Mellow, and Voiced/Unvoiced) and Resonance Features (Compact/Diffuse, Grave/Acute, Flat/Plain, Sharp/Plain, Tense/Lax, and Nasal/Oral).
In Chomsky & Halle (1968), [vocalic], [consonantal], and the then novel [sonorant] were grouped as the three major class features, a term still in wide use. Their term Source feature, not to be confused with Fundamental Source features, puts together [heightened subglottal pressure], [voice], and [strident].
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.
Jakobson, Roman, and Linda R. Waugh. 1987. The sound shape of language, 2nd edn. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Further Reading
Van der Weijer, Jeroen (ed.) 2023. Representing phonological detail: Part I: Segmental structure and representation. (Phonology and Phonetics 32). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Author
Paul D. Fallon