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

the dichotomous scale is a principle imposed by the analyst or inherent in the
structure of language, they adduce ‘several weighty arguments’ in support of
this hierarchical approach to feature specification. First, they claim (1956: 47) that
such a system is an ‘optimal code’ for speech participants who have to encode
and decode messages; I will discuss this claim further in §4.4.
Their second argument involves language acquisition (cf. Jakobson 1941).
They suggest that distinctive features are necessarily binary because of the way
they are acquired, through a series of ‘binary fissions’. They propose (1956: 41)
that the order of these contrastive splits is partially fixed, thereby allowing for
certain developmental sequences and ruling out others.
The sequence in (4.2), for example, concerns oral resonance (primary and
secondary place) features. The decimals indicate precedence relations: if one
decimal sequence is entirely contained in another sequence, then the contrast
corresponding to the former must precede the acquisition of the latter contrast.
In (4.2), wide (equals compact) vowels are low vowels of high sonority; narrow
(equals diffuse) vowels are high vowels of low sonority; palatal vowels are front ,
and velar vowels are back. Thus, (4.2) predicts that a height contrast between a
low and a high vowel (0.11) must precede the emergence of a contrast between a
front and a back vowel (0.111), since 0.11 is contained in 0.111. Further, the latter
contrast should emerge in the high vowels (0.111) before it can emerge in the low
vowels (0.1111). At this point also a rounding contrast can arise in the high
vowels (0.1112), and this must precede the development of a rounding contrast
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