| Abstract: |
The task of finding the distinctive features to best describe a vowel inventory
seems nondeterministic. The set of features must describe the inventory in as few
features as possible, while providing feature contrasts between vowels to satisfy the
active phonological processes in the language. Several previous algorithms have been
able to define contrastive vowels for a vowel inventory with a pre-specified set of
distinctive features, but these algorithms fail without prior knowledge of the feature set.
In this thesis, I have created and implemented the Best Binary Split algorithm, a
deterministic algorithm which is able to find the set of distinctive features and the set of
contrastive vowel pairs for a language using only the vowel inventory of that language, a
global feature hierarchy, and a deterministic process for reranking that hierarchy for each
language based on the patterning of natural classes of vowels in that language. |
