Major Class Features

Counterpart

Cavity Features, Manner of Articulation Features, Source Features, Prosodic Features

Feature System

Definition

The major class features are those features that divide speech sounds into the major categories vowels, consonants, obstruents, sonorants, glides, and liquids. The features that cross-classify these major classes are [sonorant], [vocalic], and [consonantal]. The term “major class feature” is simply a cover term for those features.

Purpose

The major class features characterize the major classes of sounds in a convenient way. They reflect the alternation of an open, flowing phase of the vocal tract, in contrast to a closed phase in which airflow is impeded or stopped and pressure builds. The features are customarily listed first, at the top of a full feature matrix (e.g. Halle 1962, 1964; Harms 1968:14; Hyman 1975:244). Chomsky & Halle (1968:303) present the following table to illustrate the function of the major class features:

	sonorant	consonantal	vocalic
voiced vowels	+	–	+
voiceless vowels	+	–	–
glides (I): w, y	+	–	–
glides (II): h, ʔ	+	–	–
liquids	+	+	+
nasal consonants	+	+	–
nonnasal consonants	–	+	–

History

Two of the major class features, [vocalic] and [consonantal] can be found categorized together as “fundamental source features” in Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1952:18-20). In Jakobson & Halle (1956:29-31), the concept “sonority features” is opposed to “tonality features”. However, the sonority features included not only [vocalic] and [consonantal], but seven other features as well, so the conceptual framework was quite different. The earliest mention in print appears to be Bailey (1968), but it is probable that he had access to drafts of Chomsky & Halle (1968) before publication (e.g. Bailey & Milner ms), since SPE was developed over the course of a decade (Chomsky & Halle 1968:x). Within SPE, there is a shift away from the feature [vocalic] to [syllabic]. Chomsky and Halle (1968:354) credit Milner and Bailey’s suggestion that [vocalic] be replaced by [syllabic], which “would characterize all segments constituting a syllabic peak.” However, there is not a source given for Milner and Bailey. McCawley (1967:119; 1972:526) claims to have coined the term [syllabicity] for the feature.

	sonorant	syllabic	consonantal
vowels	+	+	–
syllabic liquids	+	+	+
syllabic nasals	+	+	+
nonsyllabic liquids	+	–	+
nonsyllabic nasals	+	–	+
glides: w, y, h, ʔ	+	–	–
obstruents	–	–	+

In the framework of feature geometry, the major class features have been assigned to the root node (Schein & Steriade 1986, McCarthy 1988).

Clements & Hume (1995) reconceive the major class features to be [sonorant], [approximant], and [vocoid] (the converse of [consonantal].The term “major class features” is still used in current work, e.g. Mielke (2011) and Gussenhoven & Jacobs (2025:70).

References

Bailey, Charles-James N. 1968 (January 28). Syllabic, semisyllabic and unsyllabic in English: A ternary distinction. PEGS Paper 22.

Bailey, C.-J. N., and J.-C. G. Milner. ms. The major class features “sonorant” and “vocalic” and the problem of syllabicity in Generative Phonology, with a Note on the feature “high”. (Cited as a manuscript in Milner (1967), which was published in July 15, 1967).

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

Clements, G.N.; and Elizabeth V. Hume. 1995. The internal organization of speech sounds. The handbook of phonological theory, ed. by John Goldsmith, 245-306. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Gussenhoven, Carlos, and Haike Jakobs. 2025. Understanding phonology, 5^th edn. Abingdon: Routledge,

Harms, Robert T. 1968. Introduction to phonological theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Halle, Morris. 1962. Phonology in generative grammar. Word 18.54-72.

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

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 (Jan. 1952). 2nd revised edition, May 1952. 3rd. edn. unchanged except for the addition of eight references, Sept. 1961, printed by MIT Press. 4th edn., unchanged except for the addition of the Supplement by Jakobson & Halle “Tenseness and Laxness”, Aug. 1963. 6th printing, Sept. 1965. 7th printing, 1967.

McCarthy, John. 1988. Feature geometry and dependency: A review. Phonetica 43.84-108.

McCawley, James D. 1967. Le rôle d’un système de traits phonologiques dans une théorie du langage. Langages 8.112-123. English version printed as The role of a phonological feature system in a theory of language. Phonological theory: Evolution and current practice, ed. by Valerie Becker Makkai, 522-528. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972. htps://doi.org/10.3406/lgge.1967.2896

Mielke, Jeff. 2011. Distinctive features. The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, vol. 1: General issues and segmental phonology, ed. by Marc van Oostendorp; Colin J. Ewen; Elizabeth Hume; and Keren Rice, 391-415. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Milner, J.C. 1967. French truncation rule. Quarterly Progress Report of the [MIT] Research Laboratory of Electronics86.273-283.

Schein, Barry, and Donca Steriade. 1986. On geminates. Linguistic Inquiry 17.691-744.

Author

Paul D. Fallon