468 MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN
equal. And it is an explicit condition that any particular language must be
compatible with the universal principles, i.e., constrained by them, though
not uniquely determined by them. Thus are generated an elaborated set of
universal expectations about the various possible phonological systems of
languages, all compatible with the principles, i.e., a typology of systems in
comparative terms.
Consider more particularly a syllable structure such as the familiar
CV(C)- sort. As Jakobson has noted (Jakobson & Halle 1956:21), there is
a position called "syllable peak," phonetically associable with the sonorous
peak, maximal musicality, maximal openness of articulators within the buc
cal cavity, etc., represented by V; and inversely, there is a position called
"syllable slope," phonetically the maximal opposite, obligatorily at syllable
initial, optionally at syllable final. The so-called features of a phonological
system are ways of classifying the segmental phonemes of any language so
as to give universally-valid comparability to the distributions of sounds in
syllables. For example, true vowels, defined in an older feature system as
[-ens, +voc], always can function as syllable peaks; true consonants, simi
larly defined as [+cns, -voc], always can function as initial syllable slopes;
etc. The number of such significant distributional classes, including sub-
positions within the primordial "C" and "V" syntagmatic units, varies from
language to language. But the formal-functional universals allow us to
derive specific regularities about what to expect in each kind of relative dis
tributional position, given the number of relevant distinct classes, on a basis
that is phonetically characterizable. In particular, such formal-functional
universals dictate that the phoneme-segment that functions in such-and-
such distributional way in the language-specific syllable structure will
always include specifically the phonetic value of such-and-such universal
specification. That is, there is a language-independent phonetic characteri
zation of some "point" in a phonetic space of organized possibilities of dif-
ferentiable values, which is the differential defining point that must be
included in some phonemic segment with a specified relative distribution in
some language. It is the defining point of the segmental phoneme, because
the formal-functional universal allows us to derive the fact that a phoneme
with particular relative distributional characteristics (in a whole system of
similar units), regardless of whatever other points it includes, must include
that particular phonetically-specifiable value, to the exclusion of other
phonemes.