The Failure of Distinctive Features to Explain the Sound Change [t] to [?]

Abstract

The change of an alveolar stop [t] to a glottal stop [?] (in words such as butter and water) is very common in Cockney and other dialects of English. The failure of proposed distinctive features to explain, predict, or accommodate this sound change reveals a definite weakness in distinctive feature theory. More specifically, it indicates that place of articulation has not been adequately described in terms of distinctive features, since neither the 1952 Jakobson-Fant-Halle features nor the 1968 revised Chomsky-Halle features ”capture” the real phonetic similarities and differences between different places of articulation. I suggest that the real phonetic similarities between apical (alveolar or dental) stops and glottal stops is found only in the acoustic and auditory stages of the speech chain. The failure of the earlier (1952) features therefore stems from a demand for correlates at all stages of the speech chain, while that of the latter (1968) feature follows from a restriction to correlates at the articulatory stage only.