
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 per cent 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 available in a program downloadable from the publisher's web site.
This book investigates whether distinctive features in phonology are innate, universal components of the human language faculty or learned, language-specific constructs. Jeff Mielke, a specialist in phonology and typology, utilizes a massive cross-linguistic dataset to challenge the long-standing Chomskyan assumption that distinctive features are fixed within Universal Grammar. By systematically testing the predictive power of current phonological theories against data from nearly six hundred languages, Mielke argues that existing models fail to account for the diversity of natural and unnatural sound classes observed in human speech.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Experts recognize this work as a rigorous empirical challenge to the standard generative view of phonological features. Readers frequently note the high level of technical density and the necessity of familiarity with phonological theory to fully grasp the author's arguments.
Page Count:
256
Publication Date:
2008-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0191525944
ISBN-13:
9780191525940
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