Distinctive Features and Meaning Equivalence

Abstract

Some babbling babies probably produce all the sounds ever employed in any language; despite this, every language has a limited number of phonemes. In a language that has only about a dozen phonemes, like Fox, there will be more free and positional subphonemic variants than in a language with four dozen phonemes. When a child stops making random sounds (babbling), and limits himself to the phonemes used byolder people of his speech community, he may be said to have learned to speak his native language. There is no comparable measuring-point in a child's progress in learning the morphemes of his native language. Indeed, even adults continue to learn new morphemes as long as they have new cultural experiences. An old man who decides that it would be fun to learn to play the saxophone and spends his evenings in musical circles, may find his new associates speaking sometimes of bop music, sometimes of rebop music; unless his friends are musicologists, they cannot define bop or rebop, or tell him the difference between the two. The old man, just like a child, will learn the meaning of these strange new words by listening to the utterances which his friends make about different kinds of music. In analyzing a language like English, which contains innovations like bop and rebop, a linguist might at first suppose that bop is related to rebop as investigation is related to reinvestigation; and if this turns out to be true, he will say that rebop consists of two morphemes reand bop, just as reinvestigation consists of reand investigation. Furthermore, he will not only list all the morphemes in the utterances which he is considering, as those in our example, but also give the distribution of the morphemes. Thus, if our example shows three different morphemes,' he will say that two of these are free, and that the third morpheme (re-) appears only in sequences with the free ones (bop and investigation). We now raise the question: is re-, in both the sequences indicated above, the same morpheme? The answer may be said to depend on the meaning of rein both sequences. In reinvestigation the meaning of reis something like 'again'; but people in Chicago use rebop and bop for the same kind of music; and this kind, furthermore, is known in southern Indiana only by the name of rebop. The shorter form is, then, a morpheme alternant of rebop; the latter is the only alternant known in the periphery of its present diffusion. This additional in-