Distinctive Features Essay

Distinctive features
Introduction
The discussion of sounds has never conducted to the point of what is sound made of as a unit. It has been considered that phoneme is the smallest unit of sounds. However, this phoneme can be divided into parts to be studied and to differentiate from other phonems. Phonetics is the science that describes , explains and classifies phonemes according to some special features. All the sounds of the natural speech can be distinguished by these features. In fact, if we a change any feature of any phoneme we will produce a different sound. For example , the phonemes /k/ and /g/ are almost the same but they still are different. Both have the same following features : velar, non-aspirated, stop. But the difference is

It enables us to distinguish the natural classes in any language. It also expresses the differences between the different phonemes. And plays a part in the optimality theory in which constraint comes up to the

A positive value [ + ] means the presence of the feature when the negative value [ - ] means the absence of the feature. However, there are some privative feature which its presence does not require an absence of another feature.
The famous linguist Roman Jakobson is the father of the distinctive features, although the first idea was come up by Trubetzkoy. Distinctive features have been through lots of developments and by many linguists which came up with different models of the distinctive features. Chomsky and Halle' model , Anderson and Ewen' model are famous models beside jakobson and halle ones.
I will spot the light on Chomsky and Halle's model because they were seeking to put a system of rules which explain the sentence's structure and the phonological changes it has gone through. Their models is an interpretation of what jakobson proposed. Chomsky and Halle have the distinctive features divided into five groups:
i. Major Class features. ii. Cavity