Chapter 5: Phonological structure: The Phoneme and its allophones.

Segmental
specification: Distinctive Features in various phono-logical theories
5.1. Individual sounds and classes of sounds. The phoneme and its
contrastive function
5.2. Allophones. Complementary distribution and free variation
5.3. The phonological idiosyncrasy of linguistic systems
5.4. Broad and narrow transcription
5.5. Segmental and suprasegmental phonemes
5.6. From the minimal unit of linguistic analysis to the bundle of
distinctive features
5.7. Jakobson and Halle’s feature system
5.8. Chomsky and Halle’s distinctive features
5.9. Ladefoged’s feature system
5.10. The use of features for segmental specification and for the
description of phonological processes

5.6. From the minimal unit of linguistic analysis to the bundle of

distinctive features

The “discovery” of the phoneme thrilled linguists enormously. Scholars working

in the domain of humanities have always lived with the complex of the extraordinary
achievements of their colleagues studying exact or natural sciences. If mathematicians
walked on such a rigorous and strictly organized ground, if biologists like Linné were
able to so convincingly classify and explain the extraordinary variety of living creatures
why should linguistics and literary sciences, for example, work with vague and slippery
concepts? Couldn’t empirical observation be organized in this field too, couldn’t general
principles be enounced and rules be discovered and formalized just as in the domains of,
say, physics or algebra? And if this was not possible did disciplines like linguistics and
literary criticism deserve the name of sciences, after all? So that when the phoneme was
“discovered” an analogy struck the mind of enthusiastic researchers. If languages were
multi-layered systems of levels that were hierarchically and isomorphically organized –
in other words the elements of one level could be analyzed (etymologically decomposed)
into smaller elements at the immediately inferior level and so on until the lowest level is
reached, hadn’t linguists actually hit the ultimate and smallest unit in language – the
phoneme? If physicists and chemists had discovered the atom, the minimal structure in
the universe that could not be further decomposed (the reality later proved to be bitterly
disappointing), wasn’t the status of the phoneme in linguistics exactly the same?
If we remember the presentation in the first chapter of this book of the stages in
the process of communication, the reasoning roughly went along the following lines:
sentences could be analyzed into phrases at the syntactic level, that could be further split
into words and morphemes at the morphological level to be finally decomposed into
phonemes at the phonological level. The phoneme would be then the minimal unit in
language. Unlike words, morphemes, phrases and sentences at the superordinate levels it
will be itself devoid of meaning, since le signifiant is only accidentally a unique
phoneme, but rather a combination or string of phonemes, but will have an essential role
(a contrastive one as we saw) in keeping apart semantically different sequences.
Nevertheless, from the perspective on the phoneme presented above, this newly
found atom of language didn’t seem to have much substance after all. To say that p in pot
is not n in not may, of course, be important, but it is not very illuminating about the true
nature of either p or n, since it amounts to saying what p and n are not rather than what
they are. If we agree that they are different, is this difference purely functional, or does it
rather have some phonetic substance as well? And if it does, what is it based on? How are
they different after all? In terms of our discussion of the two sounds we will say that most
of their characteristics or features are common, with the exception of one important
feature: voicing or vocal cord vibration. However, acknowledging the fact that each
phoneme could be analyzed (that is decomposed ) in terms of characteristic features
actually amounted to doing away with the myth of the atomic phoneme. The unbreakable
atom could after all be split into component features. Thus it came to have substance and
be understood not only in functional terms – its oppositional value – but also as a
combination or, to use the established term, a bundle of distinctive features. What does
distinctive mean? Some of the features we mentioned earlier seem to be more relevant
than others, in certain contexts at least, since /p/ and /b /– to refer to the actual example
we discussed before – have lots of features in common (plosive, bilabial, obstruent
sounds) and only differ in one; because this feature that differentiates or distinguishes
them, it was called distinctive feature.
Now that the concept of phoneme unbreakability was dead, linguists
enthusiastically set about inventorying and describing the distinctive features, the new
minimal units at the phonological level. (Phonology was again a pioneer in the field as
the ”fashion” subsequently spread to other linguistic disciplines – see componential
analysis in semantics, for instance). This actually became one of the main tasks of
phonologists: identifying the exact set of features that are relevant for any language and
describing the way these features are relevant for phonological processes. It proved to be,
however, a difficult task since there were several criteria that could be used in analyzing
the features (articulatory, acoustic, auditory) and some features were particularly relevant
for some languages while in other languages not only were they not distinctive, but could
not be identified at all when examining the phonemes of the respective languages. Should
specialists continue to aim at designing a set of universal features or rather start from the
idea of the highly idiosyncratic character of each language and design individual sets of
features? As the idea of language universals was very dear to linguists and, moreover,
there was much empirical support for such a hypothesis, a universal set of features was
established – based on fundamental similarities among languages – while some other
features were specified as being relevant for a more limited number of languages. (As we
are going to see later, a feature like guttural will not be relevant for any European
language; but this is not the case of only such “exotic” features. Nasality, for instance is
distinctive and has a phonemic value when we analyze French vowels, while in languages
such as Romanian and English it is a purely contextual feature that characterizes
allophones of vowel phonemes distributed in a nasal environment).
Since phonemes had an oppositional value and the contrasts they established
seemed to be of a binary kind (of the type either…or) the features were - at least initially
- devised in the same way. When we talk about binary oppositions, we have in mind a
polarity. The respective feature has two poles and an element characterized by it can only
be situated at one of the poles. To give a clearer example, I will refer to a semantic
opposition of this kind: dead/alive. Along the feature “endowed with life” we can only
encounter the two situations mentioned above. If something is alive, than it is not dead
and if it is dead, it is not alive. No intermediate degrees are allowed as in the case of the
opposition cold/hot where it is clear that if something is not hot it doesn’t necessarily
follow that it is cold: it can be warm, cool, etc. This is a reductive perspective and there
are very few natural or linguistic phenomena that can accurately be described in these
terms. Reality is much more complex, allowing for infinite degrees and it can be rarely
reduced to an either... or opposition. Many features were felt as being more accurately
describable in terms of scalar values. Instead of heaving two poles – the opposite values
of the feature, a hierarchy of intermediate degrees was introduced. Therefore, instead of
the +/- opposition described above, many features were later described using the symbol
α that marked a variable degree of the characteristic (see the opposition high/low in
vowels, discussed in a previous chapter). It doesn’t only have the two poles as it allows
for different degrees of aperture: mid, high-mid, open-mid vowels). However, it seemed
very convenient and efficient to overlook such details and simplify matters by only
allowing the features to be specified by either + or –. Along the feature [voice], for
example, we have two values or specifications, the former symbol clearly marking the
presence of the feature, while the latter marks its absence. Thus the voiceless plosive /p/
will be specified [-voice], while its voiced counterpart /b/ will receive the specification
[+voice]. Still, some features are not really analyzable in binary terms at all. How are we
to reduce the multitude of places of articulation of consonants to binary oppositions? Can
we say, for example, that a sound is non-alveolar? There is no such place of articulation,
so “non-alveolar” can mean bilabial, palatal, velar, etc. Place of articulation features thus
do not have just two values or specifications. Therefore, a specification such as [-
alveolar] would be meaningless. Clearly such features failed to establish oppositions of
the type presented above and were considered, in later approaches, unary features, as they
only had one value or specification.
Most of the remaining part of the chapter will be devoted to a sketchy presentation
of the distinctive features in various influential approaches.