Phonological Markedness and Distinctive Features

Phonological Markedness and Distinctive Features establishes a new set of parameters for use in phonological studies of language. Arthur Brakel finds the exciting well-known approaches to phonological description overly elaborate but at the same time inadequate for enumerating and analyzing the many sounds linguists know occur. In their place, he proposes a new set of nineteen articulatory primes based on a priori semiotic principles that establish a distinctive value or markedness of a particular sound quality or articulatory gesture. He bolsters his new theory by testing the primes with examples from the phonemes of twenty-three largely unrelated languages.