Where Do Phonological Features Come From

This volume offers a timely reconsideration of the function, content, and origin of phonological features, in a set of papers that is theoretically diverse yet thematically strongly coherent. Most of the papers were originally presented at the International Conference "Where Do Features Come From?" held at the Sorbonne University, Paris, October 4-5, 2007. Several invited papers are included as well. The articles discuss issues concerning the mental status of distinctive features, their role in speech production and perception, the relation they bear to measurable physical properties in the articulatory and acoustic/auditory domains, and their role in language development. Multiple disciplinary perspectives are explored, including those of general linguistics, phonetic and speech sciences, and language acquisition. The larger goal was to address current issues in feature theory and to take a step towards synthesizing recent advances in order to present a current "state of the art" of the field.

This book intends to place Nick Clements’ contribution to Feature Theory in a historical and contemporary context and to introduce some of his unpublished manuscripts as well as new work with colleagues collected in this book.

This volume consists of nine articles dealing with topics in distinctive feature theory in various typologically diverse languages, including Acehnese, Afrikaans, Basque, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Navajo, Portuguese, Tahltan, Terena, Tswana, Tuvan, and Zoque. The subjects dealt with in the book include feature geometry, underspecification (in rule-based and in Opti-mality Theoretic treatments) and the phonetic implementation of phonological features. Other topics include laryngeal features (e.g. [voice], [spread glottis], [nasal]), and place features for consonants and vowels. The volume will be of interest to all linguists and advanced students of linguistics working on feature theory and/or the phonetics-phonology interface.

This volume includes papers by leading figures in phonetics and phonology on two topics central to phonological theory: tones and phonological features. Papers address a wide range of topics bearing on tones and features including their formal representation and phonetic foundation.

This book intends to place Nick Clements contribution to Feature Theory in a historical and contemporary context and to introduce some of his unpublished manuscripts as well as new work with colleagues collected in this book."

Publisher Description

Phonological Structure and Phonetic Form brings together work from phonology, phonetics, speech science, electrical engineering, psycho- and sociolinguistics. The chapters are organized in four topical sections. The first is concerned with stress and intonation; the second with syllable structure and phonological theory; the third with phonological features; and the fourth with "phonetic output." This volume will be important in making readers aware of the range of research relevant to questions of linguistic sound structure.