Abstract
The feature-economy principle is one of the key theoretical notions which have been postulated to account for the structure of phoneme inventories in the world's languages. In this paper, we test the explanatory power of this principle by conducting a study of the co-occurrence of consonant segments in phonological inventories, based on a sample of 2761 languages. We show that the feature-economy principle is able to account for many important patterns in the structure of the world's phonological inventories; however, there are particular classes of sounds, such as what we term the ‘basic consonant inventory’ (the core cluster of segments found in the majority of the world's languages), as well as several more peripheral clusters whose organisation follows different principles.
Highlights
A central question in phonological typology is whether there are principles that govern the size, structure and constituent parts of phonological inventories, and if so, what they are
Albeit largely congruent, formulations of this principle were proposed by Lindblom & Maddieson (‘small paradigms tend to exhibit ‘unmarked’ phonetics whereas large systems have ‘marked’ phonetics’; 1988: 70) and Clements (‘languages tend to maximise the ratio of sounds over features’; 2003: 287)
We have investigated the extent to which the feature-economy principle accounts for sound systems
Summary
A central question in phonological typology (and in phonology more generally) is whether there are principles that govern the size, structure and constituent parts of phonological inventories, and if so, what they are. Albeit largely congruent, formulations of this principle were proposed by Lindblom & Maddieson (‘small paradigms tend to exhibit ‘unmarked’ phonetics whereas large systems have ‘marked’ phonetics’; 1988: 70) and Clements (‘languages tend to maximise the ratio of sounds over features’; 2003: 287) This idea goes back at least to early work in structuralist phonology, including Trubetzkoy (1939), Martinet (1952) and Hockett (1955), who were interested in the extent to which phonological inventories are symmetrical with respect to features, or, in other words, how much ‘mileage’ phonological inventories get out of individual features; see an overview of early developments of this concept in Clements (2003). Similar conclusions were later reached using different formulations and/ or different datasets (Marsico et al 2004, Coupé et al 2009, Mackie & Mielke 2011, Moran 2012, Dunbar & Dupoux 2016), and theoretical and experimental investigations of feature economy have become a major line of phonological research: see Pater (2012), Verhoef et al (2016) and Seinhorst (2017)
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