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

Stanley (1967: 416) considers the case of a language like Russian, where all
[–consonantal] segments are [+voiced]. By redundancy (and by feature ordering,
assuming [consonantal] is ordered higher than [voiced]), we would therefore not
specify such segments as [+voiced]. Suppose now that the language also has a
rule (cf. RVA in Russian) that applies to the class of voiced obstruents,
[+consonantal, +voiced]. Stanley observes that a phonological rule could just
mention [+voiced], taking advantage of the fact that [–consonantal] segments are
not specified at the point in the phonology where this rule applies. 13 He writes
(1967: 416) that ‘this is a specious simplification, an improper use of blanks.’
What Stanley considered specious was later considered a result! Thus, we
can explain why rules spreading voicing values do not affect sonorants, and are
not triggered by sonorants, if sonorants indeed lack contrastive specifications for
[voiced], and are barred (at least in a certain component of the grammar) from
taking any on. 14
4.8.2. Arguments against ‘branching diagrams’
Stanley (1967: 407) opens his discussion of the ‘branching diagrams’ (contrastive
hierarchy) of Halle (1959) by recalling Halle’s (1959: 35) observation that ‘not all
ways of choosing the non-redundant feature values leave open the possibility of
13 Stanley assumes here the sub-matrix interpretation of rule application.
14 We may still want to rule out some of the situations Stanley wished to bar, not by banishing
blanks from the phonology, but through other means, by limiting the power of phonological
operations (see Dresher 1985 for further discussion).
152