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

‘benign’ because it is the typical circularity characteristic of scientific explanation.
To explain why objects fall to the earth with a certain acceleration, we posit a
force of gravity; evidence for this force is the fact that objects fall with a certain
acceleration. What is important is that contrast and activity are not defined in
terms of each other: activity is not part of the definition of contrast, and contrast
is not part of the definition of activity. Activity is not defined in terms of contrast
because the various manifestations of activity do not refer to the contrastive
status of features. Contrast is not defined in terms of activity because the notions
of feature ordering and the SDA do not refer to activity. Moreover, there are
situations where we must designate features as contrastive to differentiate
between phonemes in the absence of any evidence of activity.
At a practical level, the hypothesis that only contrastive features are active
can be easily falsified. If in Artshi, for example, we found that the features
[round] and [back] were both active in /u/ and /o/, and that [+low] was active
in /a/, this result would not be consistent with the hypothesis in (3.41). For there
is no feature ordering that would make all these features contrastive at the same
time. Conversely, this hypothesis is supported to the extent we find cases where
the active features are consistent with orderings that make them contrastive.
To sum up, based on the work surveyed in this chapter, we have sketched
the beginnings of a theory of phonology that assigns a central role to contrastive
feature specifications. So far, this theory has two main tenets: (1) only contrastive
feature specifications are active in the phonology (the Contrastivist Hypothesis),
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