An Outline of Linguistic and Anthropological Interests in the Concept of Distinctive Features

Abstract

This paper is a survey and explication of linguistic and anthropological interests in the concept of distinctive features. The aim of this research is to see what kind of similarities, if any, there are between linguistic and anthropological ways of thinking that make them different, at least to some anthropologists, from history, sociology and some other social sciences. Although the concept of distinctive features has long been established in linguistics, it has not been used explicitly until very recently by anthropologists. But our contention is that we can trace the history of anthropological thoughts back to Morgan to find an incipient form of this concept. After a very brief survey of the history of the concept in both disciplines we come to the conclusion that both are not really "social sciences" in the usual sense of the term, because their purposes are not to account for what actually happens in particular societies, but to explicate what are the fundamental, supposedly universal, mental structures of human beings. In other words, what they are trying to account for is not social phenomena as such, but the underlying cognitive categories of man : the former is a mere realization of the latter. One corollary of this conclusion is that both linguists and anthropologists are never satisfied with statistical explanations, with probabilities ; what they are looking for is certainties and this, in turn, is deeply related with our dichotomous (either-or) way of thinking in everyday life. Indeed, just as we pecceive a sound of Japanese as either /p/ or /b/ even if it is somewhere in between, so we perceive important features of cultural phenomena discretely. In that sense, both anthropology and linguistics are "cultural ". Another corollary is that both disciplines are as rigorous as any other sciences are in that they are looking for and have succeeded to a certain extent in finding minimal elements which can be compared cross-culturally ; they have succeeded, at least partially, in overcoming relativism which has bothered researchers for so long.