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

implication’ that are ‘universally valid or at least have a high statistical
probability: X implies the presence of Y and/or the absence of Z.’ These laws
limit the possible variety of phonological systems to ‘a limited set of structural
types.’
Jakobson, Fant and Halle (1952: 10) claim that the dichotomous scale of
distinctive features, in the context of the patterning of the linguistic code,
influences perception of speech sounds:
‘Therefore, a monolingual Slovak identifies the rounded front
vowel /O/ of the French word jeu as /e/, since the only distinctive
opposition in his mother tongue is acute (front) vs. grave (back)
and not flat (rounded) vs. plain (unrounded). A monolingual
Russian, on the contrary, perceives the same French vowel as /o/
because his native tongue possesses only the one of the two
oppositions in question, namely flat vs. plain. 1
It is clear that reference here is not to phonetic contrasts, but to the contrastive
features that are active in the phonologies of these languages.
4.3. The dichotomous scale as an acquisition sequence
The contrastive hierarchy is featured prominently in Jakobson and Halle’s
influential Fundamentals of Language (1956). Jakobson and Halle (1956: 47) refer to
this hierarchy as the ‘dichotomous scale’. In reply to Chao (1954), who asked if
1 The rationale behind this analysis is provided in Jakobson 1962 [1931], discussed in §1.1.
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