The Role of Features in Phonological Inventories

Abstract

Phonological inventories are structured in terms of distinctive features, rather than finer-grained phonetic categories. Five feature-based principles are discussed and exemplified with respect to data drawn from a database containing 451 phoneme inventories. By Feature Bounding, features place an upper bound on the number of potentially contrastive categories in a language. By Feature Economy, features tend to be combined maximally. By Marked Feature Avoidance, certain feature values tend to be avoided. By Robustness, highly-valued feature contrasts tend to be employed before less highly-valued contrasts. By Phonological Enhancement, marked feature values may be introduced to reinforce weak perceptual contrasts. These principles interact to predict broad properties of sound systems, such as symmetry and the tendency of sounds to be dispersed in auditory space. Further phonetically-based principles finetune the realization of phonological categories at the phonetic level. It is suggested that these general properties of sound systems may find an explanation in the nature of early language acquisition.

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