The Emergence of Distinctive Features

This book makes a fundamental contribution to phonology, linguistic typology, and the nature of the human language faculty. In his account Jeff Mielke presents the results of a cross linguistic 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 percent 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 Emergence of Distinctive Features will be of essential interest to phonologists and typologists, as well as to syntacticians, cognitive scientists, and scholars outside linguistics interested in the nature of language and its acquisition.

Jeff Mielke is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa.