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

palatal ¯... or the German ‘ich-Laut’ through S. The advanced
articulation of k g before j or i, as well as the existence of N instead
of ¯ before w... illustrates the unity of the saturated consonants in
French.
Jakobson and Halle (1956) return to the problem of the structure of the
French obstruent system, updating the Jakobson and Lotz feature system, but
keeping to the same basic analysis. Instead of saturation they use diffuse/
compact. A chart based on their proposal is given in (3.29).
(3.29) French consonants, based on Jakobson and Halle (1956)
diffuse
grave acute
compact
oral tns lax tns lax tns lax
discontinuous p b t d k g
continuous f v s z S Z
nasal m n ¯
Jakobson and Halle also provide arguments for their analysis over one
which bases the contrasts on point of articulation. They argue (1956: 46) that this
solution is ‘the unique solution’ on the grounds that it is optimal in terms of the
number of binary decisions that have to be made. They state that if point of
articulation rather than (dis)continuousness were distinctive, ‘then the six French
voiceless consonants…would require, for their identification, fifteen distinctions
instead of three, according to the elementary mathematical formula cited by
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