Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 Fat-Featurd

FATHER-FRONTING

  1. (Sociolinguistics; Phonology) For many English speakers in North America, the first vowel of father and that of bother are pronounced the same. In eastern New England, however, these two vowels are traditionally unmerged. For such speakers, the [a] vowel of the father lexical set is distinct from the [ɒ] or [ɑ] vowel of the bother set. The father set includes the words father, palm, calm, ma, and pa. Bother words include bother, cot, hot, socks, and shot. According to The Atlas of North American English, the fronting of the father vowel is the "aspect of the vowel system that distinguishes NeNe [North East New England] most clearly from other sections of New England." | James N. Stanford, Thomas A. Leddy-Cecere, and Kenneth P. Baclawski, Jr., 2012
  2. (Sociolinguistics; Phonology) Fronted FATHER refers to a fronted low vowel in words such as father, palm, calm, ma, and pa (Labov et al. 2006). The 1930 to 1931 fieldwork of LANE found an east-west contrast in FATHER-fronting. Likewise, ANAE considers fronted FATHER to be a distinguishing feature of Northeast New England (Labov et al. 2006). Finally, in their Vermont-New Hampshire border study 77 years after LANE, Stanford et al. (2012) found that this line of contrast for FATHER had moved eastward to the Connecticut River for older speakers (ages 61 to 92), whereas for younger speakers (ages 18 to 22), fronted FATHER had vanished as a distinguishing feature. Nagy (2001) found that southern New Hampshire participants were more likely to self-report a FATHER / BOTHER merger than were Boston participants and northern New Hampshire participants, and she concluded that southern New Hampshire speakers are resisting sociolinguistic identification with Boston. | James N. Stanford, Nathan A. Severance, and Kenneth P. Baclawski, Jr., 2014

FEATURAL AFFIXATION

  1. (Morphology) Affixes often involve segmental concatenation but may also be realized as featural changes. These non-concatenative patterns are often referred to as featural affixation or mutation (Wolf 2007).
    Examples of Different Types of Mutations
    Type Example Featural Affix Language
    Vowel Quality ʈʂhu 'water.ABS'
    ʈʂhyː 'water.GEN'     		GEN: [-back, +long]
    		Tibetan
    (Sino-Tibetan; China)
    Consonant Quality dænæg 'hit.3SG.PERF.MASC'
    dænægw '... MASC.SG.OBJ'     		OBJ: [+round] Chaha
    (Afro-Asiatic; Ethiopia)
    Length katai 'hard'
    katːai 'hard.EMPH'     		EMPH: [+long] Shizuoka Japanese
    (Japonic; Japan)
    Tone mágásɛ́ːt 'skin.OBL'
    màgásɛ̀ːt 'skin.NOM'     		NOM: LHL Kipsigis
    (Nilo-Saharan; Kenya)
     | Christine Gu, 2025
  2. (Examples)
     ○ My underlying assumption is that root-vowel fronting and backing are the result of featural affixation (see Akinlabi 1996). In Fungwa (Niger-Congo; Nigeria), the featural affixes are a diminutive morpheme with a [−back] feature and an augmentative morpheme with a [+back] feature as their phonetic exponents. The realization of the featural affixes on the root morpheme causes the root-vowel mutations. | Samuel Akinbo, 2021
     ○ This analysis adds to a growing body of work on featural affixes (McCarthy 1983, Lieber 1987, Wiese 1994/1996, Akinlabi 1996, Wolf 2007, Trommer 2012, etc.), showing that this is a viable and not uncommon phenomenon cross-linguistically. | Laura McPherson, 2017
     ○ Underlying free (floating) features occur crosslinguistically. These features sometime function as morphemes. Such features, like segmental morphemes, often refer to specific edges of the stem, hence they are "featural affixes". They get associated with the base to be prosodically licensed. | Akinbiyi Akinlabi, 1996

FEATURAL NON-DISTINCTNESS

  1. (Syntax) We propose that the identification requirement on ellipsis is satisfied by featural non-distinctness, as opposed to featural identity, an idea whose roots are found in Chomsky (1965). Our analysis proposes that mismatches at any level that violate featural non-distinctness are banned, whereas mismatches at any level that satisfy featural non-distinctness are allowed.
     Whereas a mismatch between active and passive has been observed to be impossible in sluicing across languages (Merchant 2013), a subset of voice mismatches is allowed in Kaqchikel (Mayan; Guatemala). In light of this novel observation, we propose that strict syntactic identity does not regulate the availability of ellipsis. Rather, the identification requirement on ellipsis is calculated on the basis of featural non-distinctness:
    Identification requirement on ellipsis
    Antecedent and material properly contained within the ellipsis site must be featurally non-distinct.
     | Rodrigo Ranero, 2023
  2. (Examples)
     ○ Featural non-distinctness seems to overgenerate and cannot account for the Nukuoro (Austronesian; Micronesia) data at hand. | Emily Drummond, 2025
     ○ We propose that FormCopy is not driven by featural identity but by the next most restrictive condition, i.e. non-distinctness. The degree of tolerance towards non-distinct features among the members of the wh-sequence is a matter that must be established at the Sensory-Motor interface, according to language-particular rules. | Giuseppe Rugna and Maria Rita Manzini, 2023
     ○ Ranero (2019, 2019/2023) argues that the looseness of syntactic identity in clausal ellipsis is not a question of height—above or below vP—but featural non-distinctness (cf. Chomsky 1965). With respect to the polarity mismatch in (1) in particular, Ranero argues that the antecedent and elliptical clauses are featurally nondistinct in terms of the presence versus absence of NegP.

    1. Either turn in your final paper by midnight or explain why you didn't turn it in by midnight!

     | Richard Stockwell and Deborah J.M. Wong, 2019
     ○ Following fairly standard assumptions, I will assume that binding holds when the following conditions are met:

    1.  A binds B iff:
      i. A and B are non-distinct DPs, and
      ii. A c-commands B.

     It is natural to restrict binding to DPs (possibly to DPs and CPs), the only categories that can enter into referential dependencies. Featural non-distinctness is needed to ensure feature matching between the binder and the bindee (here we cannot require the stronger condition of full structural identity: a bound pronoun is not identical to its binder, and c-command must hold). | Luigi Rizzi, 2001

FEATURAL RELATIVIZED MINIMALITY

  1. (Syntax) According to fRM, the local relation between an extracted element and its trace is disrupted when it crosses an intervening element whose morphosyntactic featural specification matches the specification of the elements it separates. | Sandra Villata, Luigi Rizzi, and Julie Franck, 2016
  2. (Syntax) Friedmann, Belletti and Rizzi (2009) and Villata, Rizzi and Franck (2016) advance featural Relativized Minimality, which incorporates revisions to the original Relativized Minimality (RM) proposal put forward by Rizzi (1990).
    Featural Relativized Minimality
    In a configuration X ... Z ... Y ..., a local relation between X and Y is disrupted when:
    1. Z structurally intervenes between X and Y (i.e., Z c-commands Y and Z does not c-command X).
    2. Z matches the specification in morphosyntactic features of X.
     RM (including featural RM) is a syntactic locality principle, governing the behavior of various kinds of dependencies, including the A′ dependencies involved in relative clauses. A dependency relationship must be established between the relative head (=X) and the position (the gap) from which movement has taken place or where the head is interpreted (=Y), in other words, the subject or object position, depending on the type of relative clause. A local dependency can be disrupted by intervening material, the disruption being worse if the intervenor shares certain kinds of features with the elements that it intervenes between. | Vera Yunxiao Xia, Lydia White, Natália Brambatti Guzzo, 2020

FEATURAL SPECIFICATION
(Example)
 ○ The featural specification of vowels in Bondu-so (Dogon; Mali):

  V-Place V-Manner
  [dorsal] [closed] [open] [ATR]
/i/   ✓   ✓
/ɪ/   ✓    
/u/ ✓ ✓   ✓
/ʊ/ ✓ ✓    
/e/   ✓ ✓ ✓
/ɛ/   ✓ ✓  
/o/ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
/ɔ/ ✓ ✓ ✓  
/a̘/ ✓   ✓ ✓
/a/ ✓   ✓  
 | Christopher R. Green and Abbie E. Hantgan, 2019
 ○ This shows that quite a few speakers allow for a grammar in which the verb agrees with NP2 independent of the featural specification of NP1. | Jutta M. Hartmann and Caroline Heycock, 2018
 ○ We also present four supplemental experiments that test the effect of complex wh-phrases (e.g., which car) on the four island types in English in an attempt to tease apart the contribution of dependency type (i.e., wh-dependency vs. rc-dependency) and the contribution of featural specification of the head of the dependency (e.g. bare wh-words in wh-dependencies vs. the nominal head and wh-word in rc-dependencies). | Jon Sprouse, Ivano Caponigro, Ciro Greco, and Carlo Cecchetto, 2015
 ○ The result of the application of the combinatorial variation algorithm for English verbal -s is then:
  1. a. [singular:+, participant:–] → -s
    b. [singular:–] → ∅
    c. [participant:+] → ∅
    d. [pronominal:–] → -s
 The generalization is then that pronominal you does not occur with verbal -s, and this follows from the lexicon given above: The only lexical items that match with the featural specification of you are (1b) and (1c), both of which have a null realization. | David Adger and Jennifer Smith, 2007

 

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