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

as the beginning of an effort to develop criteria governing the formulation of
contrastive hierarchies for particular languages. However, phonological theory
did not develop in this way.
Trubetzkoy’s failure to arrive at a consistent point of view concerning how
to determine contrasts was to be repeated many times in the history of
phonology. Particular analyses of Trubetzkoy were discussed and debated in
subsequent years – his analysis of French was to give rise to a recurring debate –
but little more was said about the criteria he proposed, or about the hierarchies
they imply. In fact, the principles governing the selection of relevant contrasts
became more obscure in subsequent work, as we shall see in the following
sections. Thus, despite its drawbacks, Trubetzkoy’s work on contrast attained a
level of insight that remained unequaled in the phonological literature.
In the rest of this chapter I will consider three structuralist analyses of the
French consonant system: Martinet 1964, Jakobson and Lotz 1949, and Hockett
1955. Each takes a different position on what the relevant contrasts are; each is
also crucially incomplete as a theory of contrast. However, we can see in these
works the central role that contrast played in phonological theory.
3.4. Martinet: French contrasts based on place
Martinet’s Éléments de linguistique générale, first published in 1960 and translated
into English by Elisabeth Palmer (Martinet 1964), follows in the Prague School
tradition of phonological analysis, which gives a central role to contrast. ‘The aim
of phonological analysis is to identify the phonic elements of a language and to
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