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The Emergence of Distinctive Features (Hardcover, New)
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The Emergence of Distinctive Features (Hardcover, New)
Series: Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory
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This book makes a fundamental contribution to phonology, linguistic
typology, and the nature of the human language faculty. Distinctive
features in phonology distinguish one meaningful sound from
another. Since the mid-twentieth century they have been seen as a
set characterizing all possible phonological distinctions and as an
integral part of Universal Grammar, the innate language faculty
underlying successive versions of Chomskyan generative theory. The
usefulness of distinctive features in phonological analysis is
uncontroversial, but the supposition that features are innate and
universal rather than learned and language-specific has never,
until now, been systematically tested. In his pioneering account
Jeff Mielke presents the results of a crosslinguistic survey of
natural classes of distinctive features covering almost six hundred
of the world's languages drawn from a variety of different
families. He shows that no theory is able to characterize more than
71 percent of classes, and further that current theories, deployed
either singly or collectively, do not predict the range of classes
that occur and recur. He reveals the existence of apparently
unnatural classes in many languages. Even without these findings,
he argues, there are reasons to doubt whether distinctive features
are innate: for example, distinctive features used in signed
languages are different from those in spoken languages, even though
deafness is generally not hereditary.
The author explains the grouping of sounds into classes and
concludes by offering a unified account of what previously have
been considered to be natural and unnatural classes. The data on
which the analysis is based are freely availablein a program
downloadable from the publisher's web site.
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