Feature Economy as a Phonological Universal

This paper compares two approaches to the study of sound inventories, one phonological and the other phonetic. The first maintains that speech sounds tend to be organized by a principle of feature economy, according to which languages maximize the combinatory possibilities of a few phonological features to generate large numbers of speech sounds. The other holds that sound systems are organized by a principle of maximal dispersion, according to which speech sounds tend to be maximally dispersed in perceptual space. A comparison of these two principles with respect to the UPSID-92 data base of phoneme inventories provides strong support for the first.