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

Phonological theory, however, did not advance in that direction. Rather,
considerations of efficient coding and minimality came to the fore. Failure to find
a universal feature order may have led to a certain loss of faith in the utility of
feature ordering. Finally, the advent of a single gradual derivation from lexical to
phonetic representations blurred the distinction between contrastive and
redundant specifications, resulting in the total eclipse of the Contrastivist
Hypothesis. Lacking this empirical motivation, the stage was set for the
contrastive hierarchy to be ushered out of phonological theory when
underspecification itself came under attack.
4.8. Stanley (1967) and the end of zeros in generative phonology
Stanley’s famous article, ‘Redundancy rules in phonology’ (Stanley 1967), is well
known in the phonological literature for its attack on the potential for misuse of
zero values in binary feature matrices. This article convinced phonologists that
the phonological component should be limited to working with fully specified
matrices. In place of filling in empty values by redundancy rules, Stanley
proposed the adoption of morpheme structure constraints. The main proposals
of this article were adopted by Chomsky and Halle 1968 (SPE) and other
influential works and effectively put an end to underspecification in phonology
for the next fifteen years.
Stanley’s general arguments against underspecification would have
sufficed to put an end to any sort of underspecification. However, he also made
some arguments explicitly against the ‘branching diagrams,’ that is, the
148