Redundant Features

Counterpart

Distinctive Features

Feature System

Definition

Redundant features are those eliminated by the analyst using a series of binary selections to determine which features are truly distinctive (Jakobson, Fant, & Halle 1952:4-13).

Purpose

Distinctive features determine the primary distinctive feature that distinguishes two sounds, e.g. in the pair of English words gib /dʒɪb/ ‘castrated tom-cat’ and gid /dʒɪd/ ‘animal disease’, the distinctive feature is [grave] for /b/ vs. [acute] for /d/. Redundant features are the remainder of predictable, allophonic differences between the sounds. For example, the /k/ sounds in English key and coo can be transcribed as [k̟ʰ] (or [cʰ]) and [k̠ʰʷ], respectively, in which redundant features of precise tongue placement, lip rounding and aspiration also characterize the sounds. Redundant features are conditioned by adjacent sounds and/or position within the word.

History

Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1952) did not enumerate which features are redundant. They provide several examples, such as: (1) the conditioned fronting of velar stops before front vowels; (2) the clear vs. dark /l/ in English; (3) the different positional realizations of English /t, d/ in word-initial prevocalic, in word-initial, pre-rhotic, and in word-final positions; (4) the different realizations of Danish strong and weak consonants. In addition to redundant features arising from sequential arrangements, redundancy may be superimposed by simultaneous distinctive features, e.g. the velarity of French /k/, palatality of /ɲ/, and prepalatality of /ʃ/, in the context of compactness in combination with [interrupted], [nasality], and [continuancy].

In SPE, the redundancy rules were much more formalized. For example, the first of two consonants, where the second one is a true consonant, the first sound must be /s/ (Chomsky & Halle 1968:171). In other cases, redundant features are factored out by rule, so that all non-coronals are [-lateral], for example (1968:407). The use of redundancy rules allowed for more concise formulations of phonological rules. Redundant features willed in the 0 values of distinctive feature matrices.

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.

Author

Paul D. Fallon