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65 BINARITY
Distinctive features
Within the Prague School of linguistics in the 1930s, binarity in phonological
distinctive features such as [� voiced] or [� back] is related to markedness.
There is a marked value for every feature (the � value) and an unmarked value.
In early markedness theory, the marked value is given to something which is
physically present in some environment (e.g. nasalisation in [m] or [a~]), but
absent elsewhere. However, as markedness theories became more sophisticated,
it has become harder to maintain the principle that for any feature the same
value is marked or unmarked in all environments. For example, ‘voiced’ seems
to be the normal state for vowels (that is, we would want to say that [� voice]
is the unmarked value for vowels), but the opposite is true for obstruents (the
norm is for them to be voiceless).
In a deservedly widely ignored paper, Halle (1957) appears to argue that
because binarity works in many places it should be used everywhere. This
seems to disregard the received wisdom of the period, inherited from the
Prague School, that there are several types of distinctive feature only some of
which are binary in nature. Thus we find scholars like Ladefoged (1971) reverting
to features with many values (multinary features) for things like vowel
height, since binary features (a) do not allow easily for five distinctive vowel
heights and (b) do not allow for simple statements of rules which raise or lower
vowels by a single step. We also find alternative approaches, such as the use of
unary features (features with just one value; that is, the feature is either present
or not) within Dependency Phonology. Even within Generative Phonology,
once feature values are filled in by general rules, problems can start to arise with
ostensibly binary features actually having three contrastive values (Stanley
1967). For instance, if we suppose that a feature whose value has not yet been
assigned is marked as u,we could imagine the three rules in (2) which would in
effect be using u as a third contrastive value of the feature.
(2) [u voice] → [� sonorant]
[– voice] → [– sonorant]
[� voice] → [– sonorant]
The question of binarity has never been definitively settled within phonology,
although modern versions of feature geometry seem to ignore it. It seems
safe to conclude that it is at least not universally accepted.
Binarity has not been questioned to the same extent in semantic features,
perhaps because semantic features themselves have rather fallen out of fashion.
Morphosyntactic features, such as those used to mark tense and case in abstract
structures, lost an absolute requirement for binarity at least as early as Gazdar
et al. (1985), where it is argued (p. 22) that ‘a feature value is either an atomic