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In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that distinguishes one sound from another within a language. For example, the feature [+ voice ] distinguishes the two bilabial plosives : [p] and [b] (i.e., it makes the two plosives distinct from one another).
The latter example shows one of the most distinctive features of AAVE: the use of be to indicate that performance of the verb is of a habitual nature. In most other American English dialects, this can only be expressed unambiguously by using adverbs such as usually. [73]
American English pronunciation of "no highway cowboys" /noʊ ˈhaɪweɪ ˈkaʊbɔɪz/, showing five diphthongs: / oʊ, aɪ, eɪ, aʊ, ɔɪ / A diphthong (/ ˈ d ɪ f θ ɒ ŋ, ˈ d ɪ p-/ DIF-thong, DIP-; [1] from Ancient Greek δίφθογγος (díphthongos) 'two sounds', from δίς (dís) 'twice' and φθόγγος (phthóngos) 'sound'), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is ...
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
Regional dialects in North America are historically the most strongly differentiated along the Eastern seaboard, due to distinctive speech patterns of urban centers of the American East Coast like Boston, New York City, and certain Southern cities, all of these accents historically noted by their London-like r-dropping (called non-rhoticity), a feature gradually receding among younger ...
An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in words such as cat, kit, scat, skit. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects, the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical: in kit ⓘ, the sound is aspirated, but in skill ⓘ, it is unaspirated.
Classes are defined by distinctive features having reference to articulatory and acoustic phonetic properties, [2] including manners of articulation, places of articulation, voicing, and continuance. For example, the set containing the sounds /p/ , /t/ , and /k/ is a natural class of voiceless stops in American Standard English.
For example, consider the pronoun in English. Pronouns are a lexical category. Pronouns have the person feature, which can have a value of "first", "second", or "third". English pronouns also have the number feature, which can have a value of either "singular" or "plural". As a result, we can describe the English pronoun "they" as a pronoun ...