linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...

, a feature is any characteristic used to classify a phoneme or word. These are often binary or unary conditions which act as constraints in various forms of linguistic analysis.

In phonology

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

, segments are categorized into natural classes on the basis of their

distinctive feature 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 oicedistinguishes the two bilabial plosives: and There are many diff ...

s. Each feature is a quality or characteristic of the natural class, such as

voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound producti ...

or manner. A unique combination of features defines a

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

. Examples of phonemic or distinctive features are: [+/-

], [+/- Advanced tongue root, ATR ] (binary features) and [ coronal consonant, CORONAL ] (a unary feature; also a place of articulation, place feature). Surface representations can be expressed as the result of rules acting on the features of the underlying representation. These rules are formulated in terms of transformations on features.

In morphology and syntax

In morphology and

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...

, words are often organized into

lexical categories In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assi ...

or word classes, such as "noun", "verb", "adjective", and so on. These word classes have

grammatical feature In linguistics, a feature is any characteristic used to classify a phoneme or word. These are often binary or unary conditions which act as constraints in various forms of linguistic analysis. In phonology In phonology, segments are categoriz ...

s (also called ''categories'' or ''inflectional categories''), which can have one of a set of potential values (also called the ''property'', ''meaning'', or ''feature'' of the category).Kibort, Anna & Corbett, Greville G
Grammatical Features - Feature Inventory
/ref> For example, consider the

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...

in English. Pronouns are a ''lexical category''. Pronouns have the

person A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...

''feature'', which can have a ''value'' of "first", "second", or "third". English pronouns also have the

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual 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 with erson:3and umber:plural Third person singular pronouns in English also have a

gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most culture ...

feature: "she" is ender:feminine "he" ender:masculineand "it ender:neuter Different lexical categories realise or are specified for different grammatical features: for example, verbs in English are specified for tense, aspect and mood features, as well as person and number. The features that a category realises can also differ from language to language. There is often a correspondence between morphological and syntactic features, in that certain features, such as

, are relevant to both morphology and syntax; these are known as ''morphosyntactic features''. Other types of grammatical features, by contrast, may be relevant to semantics (''morphosemantic features''), such as tense, aspect and mood, or may only be relevant to morphology (''morphological features''). Inflectional class (a word's membership of a particular verb class or noun class) is a purely morphological feature, because it is only relevant to the morphological realisation of the word. In formal models of grammar, features can be represented as attribute-value pairs. For example, in Lexical functional grammar, syntactic features are represented alongside grammatical functions at the level of functional structure (f-structure), which takes the form of an attribute-value matrix.

In semantics

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

, words are categorized into

semantic class A semantic class contains words that share a semantic feature. For example within nouns there are two sub classes, concrete nouns and abstract nouns. The concrete nouns include people, plants, animals, materials and objects while the abstract nou ...

es. Intersecting semantic classes share the same

semantic feature A semantic feature is a component of the concept associated with a lexical item ('female' + 'performer' = 'actress'). More generally, it can also be a component of the concept associated with any grammatical unit, whether composed or not ('female' + ...

s. Semantic features can include �humanand �animate These features may in some instances be realised morphologically, in which case they may also be called ''morphosemantic'' features.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Feature (Linguistics) Syntactic theories Generative syntax Syntax

In phonology

In morphology and syntax

In semantics

See also

References