CHOMSKY-HALLE PHONOLOGICAL FEATURE SYSTEM

Traditional categories and approaches

There are various ways in which languages have been transcribed. For example, one may symbolize one aspect of a contrast (e.g. length) or some other quality. One may show only underlying phonemes, or only some allophonic differences. Traditionally, a broad transcription designates one that uses a simple set of symbols, whereas a narrow transcription exhibits more phonetic detail. Diacritics increase precision, such as for indicating voicelessness, or a dental rather than alveolar sound.

Conventionally, transcription has two aspects, viz. the text itself and its interpretation. One set of conventions ascribes general phonetic values to symbols. Ladefoged (1993) thus regards symbols as approximate specifications of the articulations involved. The other set of conventions is constituted of the rules which specify allophones occurring in different circumstances. A systematic phonetic transcription shows all the rule-governed alternations among the sounds.

Rather than describing the sounds of English in this traditional manner, one can also specify the features of which they are composed. In phonology, a feature--or, more properly, a distinctive feature--"is the smallest contrastive unit proposed to explain how the sound system of a language is organized" (Crystal, 1992, p. 107). Voicing, tongue height, and lip rounding are examples of phonological distinctive features.

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at they receive a physical interpretation" (Chomsky-Halle, 1991, p. 65). In their classificatory function, distinctive features are binary and affect the full specification of a lexical entry; in their phonetic function, they provide a representation of an utterance. In the representations that constitute surface structure, specified features are marked plus or minus; yet, the phonological rules will gradually convert these specifications to integers. Contrarily to conventional practice, the authors do not use the diagonals vs square-brackets, because they believe that grammar consists of a long sequence of ordered rules that convert initial classificatory representations into final phonetic ones, and in the intermediate stages there are representations of a highly mixed sort. In their investigation, the researchers found that the optimal grammar of English is one in which stress is predicted by rule rather than one in which stress is inherent in the phonological matrix of a lexical entry. They therefore assumed that one of the earliest rules of the phonological component is a rule R which assigns to each segment and boundary the feature specification [-stress]. Stress is a prosodic feature, i.e., a feature whose domain extends
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