The Nature of Phonological Primes

The ideas of this paper spring from an attempt to grapple with certain phonological problems in a number of languages, and in particular with the special problems which arise when one desires to use a generative, ‘distinctive-feature’ approach. The facts of Tswana phonology summarized below (§5.1) proved especially awkward to handle; when the original twelve features were taken and assigned in a ‘classical’ manner (i.e. [+Vocalic, + Consonantal] for all Liquids, [—Vocalic, —Consonantal] for all Glides, etc.), there were found to be many different ways of characterizing the various segment-types. What was disturbing was that every one of these ways entailed writing phonological rules which failed to highlight the underlying structure, or even obscured it. Conversely, if assignments other than the ‘classical’ were permitted, any attempt to group the segment-types into an arrangement which faithfully reflected the relationships between them (such as Table 8 below) left one with insuperable phonetic problems of feature-assignment. Both these types of difficulty are exemplified in Appendix i.