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

4. The Rise and Fall of the Contrastive Hierarchy
4.1. Introduction: Jakobson and his collaborators
The work of Roman Jakobson and his colleagues merits a separate discussion.
Many of the main ideas in Trubetzkoy’s Gründzuge were worked out in
collaboration with Jakobson. To Jakobson is due the notion of the distinctive
feature. Whereas Trubetzkoy allowed features to be gradual (multi-valued),
Jakobson eventually proposed that all features are binary. The notion that
language and cognition crucially involve binary dichotomies became central to
Jakobson’s thinking , and this idea was later taken over into generative
phonology.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Roman Jakobson, Morris Halle, and their
colleagues wrote a series of publications that laid the groundwork for the next
phase of distinctive feature theory and what eventually became the theory of
generative phonology. Much critical attention, then and afterwards, was directed
at various aspects of their theory that struck observers as being the most
controversial and innovative, such as the nature of distinctive features, the
relation of phonemes to allophones, and the organization of the grammar.
What is of greatest interest for our present purposes is an aspect of their
work that attracted relatively less attention. This is their development and
utilization of a contrastive hierarchy of distinctive features. We have seen that
such a hierarchy is already implicit in much of Trubetzkoy 1939, and it could be
that this was one source of the idea. It also fits well with Jakobson’s general
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