Distinctive Features and Phonological Theories

In defining a feature system properly, one must formally define the attributes and the type of values they can take. So far we have described a somewhat-traditional set of features (manner, place etc.), each of which can take multiple values (e.g. dental, alveolar, or palatal), and have made use of descriptive devices, such as assimilation , to describe how sounds change in particular environments. In phonology researchers attempt to improve on this, by defining features and rule mechanisms in an attempt to explain these sorts of effects in a more elegant and parsimonious manner. 

The SPE showed how many seemingly disparate phenomena could in fact be explained by rules that made direct access to the feature set. Nearly all rules were posited in terms of context-sensitive rules (tiiese rules are used to define a third fundamental type of grammar in addition to die finite-state rules and context-free rules that we saw before.). For example, the tensing rule that describes how word patterns such as divine, divinity and profane, profanity arise is given as 

One of the most important aspects of phonology concerns the structural representation of sound patterns above the phoneme. We have already seen that morpheme boundaries are significant (e.g. in the difference between the realisation of pens and pence), as are word boundaries. In addition to these, we find it very usefiil to make use of a third unit, the syllable, since this also helps explain many of the effects and patterns in speech. 

taking the vowel as the centre of the syllable, all we have to do is decide which consonants belong to which syllables. In words such as hotel, we can safely say that the /h/ belongs to the first syllable and the IV to the last, but what about the /t/ There are 

This will provide a satisfactory account for many words, and it can be argued that this has some cognitive reality because, again from singing, we find that consonants tend to follow this pattern. There are some problems, however. Firstly, in non-word-initial syllables that have /s t r/ and other such sequences, e.g. instruct, /ih n s t r ah k t/, it can be argued that the /s/ attaches to the first syllable, not to the second. Secondly, consider such words as (bookend, /b uh k eh n d/ - here it definitely seems that the /k/ attaches to the first syllable. In fact a syllable-final IkJ and a syllable-initial one sound quite different and so /b uh k. eh n d/ sounds different from /b uh. k eh n d/. There is an obvious reason for this, namely that bookend is a word formed by compounding BOOK and end, and it seems that the word/morpheme boundary has been preserved as a syllable boundary. 

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