Prosodic features

Finally, in order to account for the existence of length distinctions, and to represent stressed versus unstressed vowels, two other features were proposed:

long: has greater duration.

stress: has greater emphasis, higher amplitude and pitch, longer duration.

These are obvious: long segments are [+long] and stressed vowels are [+stress].

A major lacuna in the Chomsky and Halle (1968) account of features is a lack of features for tone. This is remedied when we introduce nonlinear representations. For the moment, we can at least assume that tones are governed by a binary feature [high tone] – this allows only two levels of tone, but we will not be concerned with languages having more than two tone levels.