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BLOCKING AND PRIVATIVE FEATURES: A PROSODIC ACCOUNT

Since Jakobson, Fant, and Halle's (1952) and Halle's (1957) work on distinctive features, it has generally been assumed within a North American paradigm that distinctive features are binary valued. While in some recent work, proposals have been put forth that at least some features are inherently privative — e.g. articulator features (Sagey 1986), [round], [lateral] (Steriade 1987), [voice] (Mester and Ito 1989; Lombardi 1991), [nasal] (Rice and Avery 1990; Piggott 1992; Steriade forthcoming), some vowel features (Goldsmith 1985, 1987) — it is generally argued that binary features are necessary in phonology (see, for example, Steriade 1987; Clements 1987, 1989, 1990a, 1990b; Christdas 1988, Archangeli 1988). Archangeli (1988: 191), for instance, makes the following comment: "It is not possible to argue that all underspecification is inherent because there is good reason to retain the binary nature of several of the distinctive features". This paper has two basic goals. The first goal is to provide an overview of some of the issues surrounding the unary/binary controversy. In the first part of the paper, I examine why on conceptual grounds privative features are to be preferred and then explore some reasons that binary features are argued to be necessary. The second goal of the paper is to take a single step in the process of eliminating binary features in favor of privative features. While most work that deals with the issue of privativity has suggested solutions to the binarity problem based on revisions of features and feature organization (e.g. van der Hülst 1989a, 1989b; Schane 1984; Anderson and Ewen 1987; Lombardi 1990; Piggott 1992; Avery and Rice 1989; Selkirk 1991) and on a revision of possible