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

Continuing their earlier attention to the question of the efficiency of the
coding obtained by their procedure, Cherry, Halle and Jakobson ask if it is
possible to remove all or many of the zero signs in their table by reordering the
features. They observe that no simple reordering will permit them to remove all
the zeros or push them to the end of each phoneme column. They go on to
propose that gains can be achieved if one gives up a fixed feature order, and
allows the order of the features to vary in different branches of the decision tree.
In their focus on the problem of zero specifications, Cherry, Halle and Jakobson
(1953) foreshadow what was soon to become a major concern in early generative
phonology.
4.5. Inconsistent approaches to contrastive specification
Though the contrastive hierarchy was well-established in the work of Jakobson
and his colleagues from the late 1940s on, it was not always strictly employed in
working out phoneme specifications. While many publications incorporate it,
some others do not, for reasons that are not made explicit. One can speculate that
the authors were somehow not satisfied with the results of feature ordering in
particular cases. It is possible that they wanted to specify certain phonemes in
ways not permitted by strict feature ordering. Another possibility is that they
were unable to arrive at a universal feature hierarchy that gave satisfactory
results for every language they studied.
In this section I will briefly review some case studies where Jakobson and
his collaborators deviate from feature ordering. The existence of these analyses
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