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

chapter). I have argued that issues of phonological contrast were central to their
thinking. Matters are somewhat more obscure when we try to isolate an explicit
or consistent approach to assigning contrastive features. However, when we put
together their most insightful and empirically supported analyses we can begin
to distil the main principles of a theory of contrastive specification.
Of the various features that characterize a phoneme, we must distinguish
between those that are contrastive and those that are redundant. We do so by
ordering the features into a contrastive hierarchy, and assigning features to
phonemes in order until each phoneme has been uniquely distinguished from
every other one. The contrastive features make up the ‘phonemic content’ of a
phoneme. There are in principle different ways of ordering the features for a
given set of phonemes, and each ordering corresponds to a particular set of
contrastive specifications. In this sense, the contrastive structure of a language is
a function of ‘point of view’, that is, of a particular way of ordering the features.
This variability gives rise to a fundamental question: how do we know
what the particular ordering is in any given case? The work surveyed in this
chapter suggest a general answer to this question. We can recognize the
phonemic content of a phoneme by its ‘patterning’, that is, by the way it behaves.
A common assumption of the authors surveyed above is that the behaviour of a
phoneme is a function of its contrastive features. Reviewing the cases discussed
above, we can compile a list (3.38) of diagnostics used in this chapter for
identifying contrastive features.
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