Establishment of a Distinctive Feature System for Consonants in Gujarathi

Abstract

Complex  objects  and  events  have  sub-units  or  recognizable  properties. These properties are termed as features. The features that help us distinguish between two entities are called distinctive features. Earlier it was believed that phoneme was the smallest unit of language and it could not be divided any further.   (Hocket,  1958),   Jakobson et al. (1952), contradicted this concept  and  proposed  that  phonemes  can be  broken  into smaller units. These smaller units are termed as features and the units  that bring about, disinction between two phonemes are called  'distinctive features'. The distinctive features of the speech sounds may be defined as follows.  'The distinctive features are the ultimate distinctive entities of language. The distinctive features combine into one simultaneous or concurrent bundle to form a phoneme (Jakobson, Fant and Halle, 1952). The framework of distinctive features is a promising tool to Speech Patho- logists and Audiologists in handling various speech and hearing problems. This approach has been found to be useful in description of articulatory behaviour (McReynolds and Huston, 1974,  Castello, 1970),  in diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of articulatory deviation (Weber,1970, Kamara and Kamara, 1974, Singh,  1970), in testing speech sound perception (Danhaner and Singh, 1975, Danhaner etal. 1978), in studying language acquisition and  phonological acquisition (Menyuk, 1968),  and in studying hemispheric specialization, (Studdert-Kennedy and Shankveiler, 1970). Several attempts have been made to describe various languages of the world using distinctive features. Different systems of distinctive features have been proposed. (Jakobson et al. '1952; Chomsky and Halle, 1968; Singh and  Becker,1972), based on different methods of extracting features. These  methods are,