Chomsky–Halle features
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Some of the binary features proposed by Chomsky and Halle are listed in Table 1. The first group comprises major class features, because these features are required for dividing sounds into classes such as vowels, consonants, and semivowels. There are several problems in giving satisfactory definitions of the phonetic properties of these features, but there is no doubt that binary oppositions of this kind are needed for describing phonological patterns.
| Part of the set of features proposed by Chomsky and Halle (1968) | |
|---|---|
| Major class features | consonantal |
| syllabic | |
| sonorant | |
| Manner of articulation features | continuant |
| delayed release | |
| tense | |
| Source features | voice |
| strident | |
| Cavity features | nasal |
| lateral | |
| anterior | |
| coronal | |
| high | |
| low | |
| back | |
| round | |
The next group, the manner of articulation features, includes continuant/noncontinuant (in which noncontinuant is exactly equivalent to the notion of stop as defined above), and delayed release (the comparatively slow parting of the articulators that occurs in an affricate). The source features refer to the action of the vocal cords (voice) or to fricative noise mechanisms (strident).
The cavity features include nasal and lateral, which are used in the same sense as they were in the section on articulatory phonetics, and the features that determine the place of articulation of consonants and the quality of vowels. The most important features specifying the place of articulation of consonants are anterior, made in the front of the mouth, and coronal, made with the tip or blade of the tongue raised toward the teeth or teeth ridge. These two features can be used to specify four places of articulation: bilabial (+anterior, −coronal); dental, or alveolar (+anterior, +coronal); postalveolar, or palato-alveolar (−anterior, +coronal); velar (−anterior, −coronal). There is still some disagreement concerning whether consonantal places of articulation are specified appropriately by binary oppositions of this kind.
There is even more disagreement over the advisability of describing vowels in terms of binary features. Chomsky and Halle use the features high/nonhigh and low/nonlow to specify the height of the tongue, midtongue positions being considered to be simply those that are -high, -low; the feature back/nonback is employed to specify the front/back distinctions among vowels. But these three features can be combined to specify only six basic tongue positions: high front, high back, midfront, midback, low front, and low back. It is true that each of these possibilities can have tense/nontense (lax) variants and rounded/nonrounded (spread) variants. But the Chomsky–Halle feature system does not permit the specification within underlying forms of central vowels, nor of more than three degrees of tongue height. Moreover, their binary oppositions of vowel height do not make it clear that the difference between low vowels and midvowels is the same as that between midvowels and high vowels.
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Table 2 shows the feature composition of a number of segments that occur in English. The phonetic symbols at the top of each column are used with the values discussed in the following section.
Phonetic transcription
There are many different kinds of phonetic transcription. In some circumstances a phonetic symbol can be simply an abbreviation for a phonetic description. The symbol [s] may then be regarded as exactly equivalent to the phrase “voiceless, alveolar, fricative.” When a linguist tries to describe an unknown language he begins by writing it down using symbols in this way. Later, when he has learned about the function of sounds and the underlying forms in the language, he might make a more systematic transcription, known as a broad transcription, in which each phoneme is represented by a simple symbol.
Occasionally it is convenient to use a transcription in which some of the allophones are represented by specific symbols, or some of the phonemes are designated by the symbols for a more restricted set of categories. If, for example, the transcription were to be used in teaching pronunciation, the difference between the aspirated and unaspirated allophones of /P/ might be represented by transcribing pan as [phan] and span as [span]; or the vowel phoneme in each of these words might be designated by the more specific symbol [æ], which represents a low front vowel of a certain type. In a narrow transcription the symbols are more specific, either because allophones are differentiated, or because the phonetic quality of the sounds is shown more precisely.
The most widely used set of symbols is that of the International Phonetic Association (IPA). In general, the consonants have the same values as the corresponding letters in many European languages; the vowel symbols have similar values to the corresponding letters in a language such as Italian.