Distinctive Features - Speech Resource Pages - Macquarie University

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unaspirated sounds are produced without this gesture." (HC) [+spread] refers to aspirated consonants, breathy voiced or murmured consonants, voiceless vowels, voiceless approximants. [-spread] refers to all other sounds. It should be stressed that during the occlusion of both voiceless aspirated and voiceless unaspirated (0 VOT) stops the glottis is open. The difference is during the period following release where, for aspirated stops, the glottis stays open much longer than for unaspirated stops. 19. constricted glottis / non-constricted glottis [constr]: "Constricted or glottalized sounds are produced with the vocal cords drawn together, preventing normal vocal cord vibration; nonconstricted (nonglottalized) sounds are produced without such a gesture." (HC) [+constr] refers to ejectives, implosives, glottalized or laryngealised consonants, glottalized or laryngealised vowels. [-constr] refers to all other sounds. 20. voiced / voiceless [voice]: "Voiced sounds are produced with a laryngeal configuration permitting periodic vibration of the vocal cords; voiceless sounds lack such periodic vibration." (HC) [+voice] refers to all voiced sounds. [-voice] refers to all voiceless sounds. 6. Australian English Vowel Features a) Australian English Monophthong Vowels When Chomsky and Halle were using their system of Distinctive Features to analyse American English vowels, they argued that it was necessary to define three levels of height:- 1. high [+high] [-low] 2. mid [-high] [-low] 3. low [-high] [+low] but only two levels of fronting:- 1. front [-back] 2. back [+back] Whilst its not impossible to describe Australian English vowels in terms of [high, low, back, round, tense] so that all monophthongs are provided with a unique featural specification the resulting system doesn't match the phonetics of Australian English vowels. In each category, front, central and back there are several vowels. To call both the central and the back vowels [+back] doesn't capture this pattern satisfactorily. For example, the vowel /ʉː/ has been moving forward over several decades and for most speakers its a high, central, rounded vowel. For some speakers it has moved even further forward (half way between central and front), but isn't yet a front rounded vowel. It makes a lot of sense to regard this as a high rounded vowel that isn't explicitly front or back (i.e. [-front, -back]). So now we can define three degree of vowel fronting:- 1. front [+front, -back] 2. central [-front, -back] 3. back [-front, +back] As stated (and justified) in the previous section, we don't use a length feature (e.g. [long]) to indicate the distinction between long and short monophthongs. We can instead refer to long vowels (and diphthongs) as tense and short vowels
as lax. Instead we use the [tense] feature to distinguish between tense [+tense] and lax [-tense]. Whilst we can sometimes determine that schwa is in some sense a reduced form of some other vowel (e.g. when vowel quality changes when we add or subtract affixes, such as the first syllable of "phonetics" versus "phonetician") for many words its now impossible to determine what the original vowel might have been (or even if there ever had been an original unreduced vowel). Because of this it seems sensible to treat schwa as a phoneme in English. We treat schwa as a vowel phoneme that has the feature [+syllabic], but is unspecified ("0") for [tense]. All other features are context dependent (ie. optional) so its probably best to also treat these features as unspecified ("0") as well. Whilst schwa could be said to be the least tense (most lax) of all vowels it shares an important property with the [+tense] vowels. It can, in English, occur in open syllables (syllables that end with a vowel). The only other vowels that can occur in open syllables in English are the [+tense] vowels (long monophthong vowels and diphthongs). Traditionally this has been explained as being due to schwa, in these contexts, being the reduced form of a tense vowel (and therefore "underlyingly" tense) but as we have described schwa as an independent phoneme this explanation no longer works. None of the other short vowels can occur in open syllables in normal words (except perhaps in interjections). If we make [tense] unspecified for schwa then we can devise a single rule that determines which vowels can occur in open syllables, i.e. "[-tense] vowels cannot occur in open syllables but all other vowels can". There are other precedents for "0" specifications for a feature. For example the delayed release [delrel] feature can only be applied to phonemes that have a release (i.e. oral stops and affricates). All other phonemes have a "0" specification for this feature. Some specifically vowel features have a "0" specification for consonants and vice versa. Feature Table for Australian English Monophthongs (all are also [+syll, -cons +son +cont]) high low front back round tense iː + - + - - + ɪ + - + - - - eː - - + - - + e - - + - - - æ - + + - - - ɐː - + - - - + ɐ - + - - - - ɔ - - - + + - oː - - - + + + ʊ + - - + + - ʉː + - - - + + ɜː - - - - - + ə 0 0 0 0 0 0
Page 1 and 2: Topics Distinctive Features © Robe
Page 3 and 4: d) Gradual Oppositions The members
Page 5 and 6: We could refer to all these phoneme
Page 7 and 8: stops are already defined uniquely
Page 9 and 10: iv. Place of articulation The [ant]
Page 11: produced without such a gesture." [
Page 15 and 16: distinct tense vowel. All other cen
Page 17 and 18: Australian English diphthongs can b
Page 19 and 20: 7. English Consonant Features (an o
Page 21 and 22: 9. Articulatory Features In more re
Page 23: 20. Jakobson, R., Fant, C.G.M. and

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