Categorisation in phonology: distinctive features
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C2P34
2025-11-26
44
Categorisation in phonology: distinctive features
One of the fundamental concepts in phonology is the distinctive feature: an articulatory feature that serves to distinguish speech sounds. For example, the sounds /b/ and /p/ are identical in terms of place and manner of articulation: both are bilabial sounds (produced by bringing the two lips together) and both are plosives (produced by momentary interruption of the airflow followed by sudden release). However, the two sounds are distinguished by the single feature voice: the phenomenon whereby the vocal folds in the larynx are drawn tightly together and vibrate as air passes through them, which affects the quality of the sound. The speech sound /b/ is voiced, whereas /p/ is produced with the vocal folds drawn apart, and is therefore unvoiced. This articulatory feature distinguishes many pairs of consonant sounds that otherwise have a similar manner and place of articulation, for example: /t/ and /d/, as in tug versus dug; /k/ and //, as in curl versus girl; and /s/ and /z/, as in Sue versus zoo.
In phonology, these distinctive features are traditionally viewed as binary features. In other words, a speech sound can be described in terms of whether it has a positive or a negative value for a certain feature. Binary features are popular in formal linguistics, because they enable linguists to describe units of language by means of a set of properties known as a feature matrix. This approach has proven particularly successful in phonology. For example, the sounds /p/ and /b/ can be characterised as follows:
However, Jaeger and Ohala (1984) presented research that questions the assumption that distinctive features are binary in nature. In fact, Jaeger and Ohala found that features like voice are judged by actual users of language as graded or fuzzy categories. Jaeger and Ohala trained naive speakers of English (that is, non-linguists), so that they could identify sounds according to whether they were [ voice] or [ voice]. They then asked subjects to rate the English plosives, fricatives, nasals and semi-vowels in terms of the voice feature. While plosives involve a sudden release of air from the mouth, fricatives are produced by the gradual release of airflow in the mouth: these are sounds like /f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, and so on. Nasals like /m/ and /n/involve continuous (uninterrupted) airflow through the nose, and semi-vowels like /w/ and /j/ (which is the IPA symbol for the sound at the start of yellow) involve continuous air flow through the mouth.
The researchers found that these sounds were not consistently judged as either voiced or unvoiced. Instead, some sounds were judged as ‘more’ or ‘less’ voiced than others. The ‘voice continuum’ that resulted from Jaeger and Ohala’s study is shown in (18a):
The sounds were rated accurately by Jaeger and Ohala’s subjects in the sense that voiced and voiceless sounds do not overlap but can be partitioned at a single point on this continuum, as shown in (18b). However, what is striking is that the subjects judged some voiced sounds (like /m/) as ‘more voiced’ than others (like /z/). These findings suggest that the phonological category VOICED SOUNDS also behaves like a fuzzy category.
Taken together, the examples we have considered from the three ‘core’ structural areas of human language – morphology, syntax and phonology – suggest that the nature of the linguistic categories we find in each of these areas can be described in rather similar terms. In other words, at least in terms of categorisation, we can generalise across what are often thought of as wholly distinct kinds of linguistic phenomena.
It is worth pointing out at this stage that cognitive linguistics is not unique in seeking to generalise across these ‘distinct’ areas of human language. Indeed, the quest for binary features in formal linguistics is one example of such an attempt. Encouraged by the relative usefulness of this approach in the area of phonology, formal linguists have, with varying degrees of success, also attempted to characterise word meaning and word classes in terms of binary features. This approach reflects an attempt to capture what are, according to many linguists, the funda mental properties of human language: the ‘design features’ discreteness and duality of patterning. Broadly, these features refer to the fact that human language is made of smaller discrete units (like speech sounds, morphemes and words) that can be combined into larger units (like morphemes, words and sentences), and that the capacity for varying the patterns of combination is part of what gives human language its infinite creativity (compare bin with nib, or Bond loves blondes with blondes love Bond, for example). Thus, different theories of human language are often united in pursuing the same ultimate objectives – here, generalisation – but differ in terms of where and how they seek to reach these objectives.
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