Introduction: Jakobson and his collaborators

The work of Roman Jakobson and his colleagues merits a separate discussion. Many of the main ideas in Trubetzkoy's Gründzuge were worked out in collaboration with Jakobson. To Jakobson is due the notion of the distinctive feature. Whereas Trubetzkoy allowed features to be gradual (multivalued), Jakobson eventually proposed that all features are binary. The notion that language and cognition crucially involve binary dichotomies became central to Jakobson's thinking, and this idea was later taken over into generative phonology.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Roman Jakobson, Morris Halle and their colleagues wrote a series of publications that laid the groundwork for the next phase of distinctive feature theory and what eventually became the theory of generative phonology. Much critical attention, then and afterwards, was directed at various aspects of their theory that struck observers as being the most controversial and innovative, such as the nature of distinctive features, the relation of phonemes to allophones, and the organization of the grammar.

What is of greatest interest for our present purposes is an aspect of their work that attracted relatively less attention. This is their development and utilization of a contrastive hierarchy of distinctive features. We have seen that such a hierarchy is already implicit in much of Trubetzkoy (1939), and it could be that this was one source of the idea. It also fits well with Jakobson's general emphasis on dichotomies as a fundamental aspect of cognition: if the distinctive feature is grounded in a binary discrimination, then it makes sense that an inventory is built up via a succession of such binary splits.