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In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that distinguishes one sound from another within a language.For example, the feature [+voice] distinguishes the two bilabial plosives: [p] and [b] (i.e., it makes the two plosives distinct from one another).
Each feature is a quality or characteristic of the natural class, such as voice or manner. A unique combination of features defines a phoneme. Examples of phonemic or distinctive features are: [+/- voice], [+/- ATR] (binary features) and [ CORONAL] (a unary feature; also a place feature).
Phonological rules are often written using distinctive features, which are (supposedly [note 3]) natural characteristics that describe the acoustic and articulatory makeup of a sound; by selecting a particular bundle, or "matrix," of features, it is possible to represent a group of sounds that form a natural class and pattern together in ...
In that view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features. The features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a universally fixed set and have the binary values + or −.
Hockett's Design Features are a set of features that characterize human language and set it apart from animal communication. They were defined by linguist Charles F. Hockett in the 1960s. He called these characteristics the design features of language.
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. [1] All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously ...
Both sound and meaning were analyzed into systems of binary distinctive features. Edwin Battistella wrote: "Binarism suggests symmetry and equivalence in linguistic analysis; markedness adds the idea of hierarchy."
Feature geometry is a phonological theory which represents distinctive features as a structured hierarchy rather than a matrix or a set. Feature geometry grew out of autosegmental phonology, which emphasizes the autonomous nature of distinctive features and the non-uniform relationships among them. Feature geometry recognizes that some sets of ...