[sonorant]

Counterpart

[nonsonorant] / [obstruent]

Feature System

Definition

The feature [sonorant] is used to describe the configuration of the vocal tract that allows spontaneous voicing (Chomsky & Halle 1968:302).

Purpose

Sonority is used to distinguish stops, fricatives, and affricates from vowels, glides, nasal consonants, and liquids. Constrictions more radical than those in [y] and [w] will result in a [nonsonorant] / [obstruent] sound. Phonemes such as [l]- and [r]-sounds are generally produced with a moderate degree of constriction, making most liquids sonorants. However, there are some liquids produced with a greater degree of constriction, such as the Czech [ř], that are to be regarded as obstruents (Chomsky & Halle 1968:302).

In many languages, unlike English, consonants are syllabic. These syllabic consonants are regularly sonorant. Some quantity-sensitive languages restrict weight-bearing segments to sonorants. Additionally, some languages allow consonants to support tone contrasts, and these consonants will almost always be sonorant (Botma 2011:171).

History

First introduced alongside [vowel], [consonant], [nasal], [oral], [diluted], [grave], [acute], [tense], [lax], [continuous], and [intercepted] by Jakobson & Lotz (1949:427-431), which defined the distinctive features of the thirty-six French phonemes.

Jakobson and his colleagues appear to have already begun to eliminate [saturated] and [diluted] from their distinctive features by 1952, in favor of more specific features that described various states of higher and lower energy sound patterns, instead of the more generic and less descriptive [saturated] and [diluted].

Both [saturated] and its counterpart were excluded from The sound pattern of English (SPE) system of phonological features and fell out of common use as the SPE features came into prominence. It is largely considered obsolete and is no longer in common usage.

References

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

Hooper, Joan B. 1976. An introduction to natural generative phonology. New York: Academic Press.

Botma, Bert. 2011. Sonorants. The Blackwell companion to phonology, vol.1: General issues and segmental phonology, ed. by Marc van Oostendorp et al., 171-194. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Author

Ainsley Graf