Testing Feature Economy
Résumé
Why do speech sounds tend to be organized along just a few phonetic dimensions in each language, such as “nasals”, “voiced fricatives”, etc.? The classic answer to this question was proposed by Martinet [8]: “Une nouvelle économie est réalisée en faisant résulter [les phonèmes] de combinaisons de traits phoniques non-successifs, ce qui réduit encore le nombre des éléments de base” (p. 95). In other words, features introduce a further level of economy by allowing the set of phonemes P to be defined in terms of a smaller set of features, F. Economy exerts pressure on systems to maximize the combinatory possibilities of features by increasing the ratio P/F. This paper outlines a method for testing feature economy, and presents illustrative results involving the patterning of labial consonants.
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