ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is on the feature specification of coronal consonants and vocoids. Motivation for a particular feature specification is grounded in what we can consider to be two of the fundamental goals of an adequate feature theory. First, a feature theory must be able to distinguish all and ideally only those sounds which are known to be phonemically contrastive in natural language. And second, an adequate feature theory must be able to refer to sounds which regularly pattern together in phonological processes, i.e. natural classes of sounds, by a single nondisjunctive set of feature specifications.
