Estudio de los rasgos distintivos del español

Abstract

In the IPA (International Phonetic Association) classification of sounds, each sound is characterized by specifying point of articulation, manner of articulation, and whether or not the sound is voiced. The distinctive features system used in generative analysis is essentially an extension of this procedure. However, each distinctive feature represents a single articulatory property of a sound, whereas some of the IPA terms refer to more than a single property each. In a generative presentation, each souqd is described in terms of a plus or minus value for each of a set of distinctive features. Each distinctive feature describes a characteristic which is either present or absent in the articulation of the particular sound. In analyzing the differences in sound that correspond to differences in meaning, it is evident that these are limited. We have known that linguistic forms can be divided into phonetic segments. These segments can be isolated and recombined into other forms. On that basis, a phoneme is defined as a minimal unit of distinctive sound feature. In other words, the phoneme is a cluster of exactly the distinctive properties of a segment and is considered to be analyzable into constituent distinctive features. In order to classify completely the sounds of a given language, a set of features must be aptly chosen so that no two sounds have the same specifications for all the features in the set. The main purpose of our study is to find a feature system which is suitable for the description of Spanish. To this end, we have included in the first two chapters explications of the two major systems of distinctive features, that of Jakobson and Chomsky & Halle. In the third chapter, we have applied some of these distinctive features to Spanish ultimately.