Articulatory Features for Describing Lexical Distinctions

The sounds that distinguish words in the world’s languages can be described in terms of properties that are often called (distinctive) features. The best-known attempts to describe sounds in this way are the acoustic features of Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1952) and the innate cognitive abilities described by the feature theory of Chomsky and Halle (1968). This article provides a more comprehensive answer to the problem of specifying contrasting segments, but one that still leaves some questions open. It also considers the constraints on possible combinations of features, using a development of the notion of a feature hierarchy suggested by Clements (1985)