The contrastive hierarchy in phonology 2009 Dresher.pdf - CUNY ...

In these examples there appears to be no alternative to a hierarchical
analysis: the pairwise method would yield the same results for all the five-vowel
systems discussed above.
3.3.4. Summary
I have argued that Trubetzkoy, despite his many contributions to our
understanding of how contrasts work in a phonological system, did not explicitly
work out a procedure for determining which features of a phoneme are
contrastive and which are redundant. When we try to deduce what he had in
mind from the particular analyses presented in the Grundzüge, we find that his
results sometimes appear to presuppose a procedure involving pairwise
comparisons of phonemes. We have seen that this method is not an adequate
way to determine contrastive features. It is interesting that Trubetzkoy’s most
obvious applications of this method occur early in the book when he is
discussing oppositions in the abstract. In these cases he brings forward no
empirical evidence that the oppositions are in fact the way he proposes. Hence, I
conclude that his analyses of these cases, such as French n, are incorrect.
Where he wishes to account for actual phonological patterning, however,
Trubetzkoy’s analyses usually imply a feature ordering approach to determining
contrastive specifications. Indeed, in hindsight, one could see Trubetzkoy’s work
underlying representation of /u/, she proposes that it is specified for /o/ (in contrast to /a/).
She proposes further that postlexical processes require the specification of additional features.
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