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

shortcomings brought about, in part, by its rejection of the Contrastivist
Hypothesis. I will look at three subtheories that arose with generative
phonology: markedness (§5.2), underspecification (§5.3), and feature geometry
(§5.4). I will concentrate on ways in which they are similar to, and differ from,
the contrastive hierarchy.
5.2. Markedness
5.2.1. Chapter 9 of SPE
Chapter 9 of SPE opens with a dramatic statement (Chomsky and Halle 1968:
400): ‘The entire discussion of phonology in this book suffers from a fundamental
theoretical inadequacy.’ This inadequacy consists of SPE’s ‘overly formal’
approach to features, which does not take into account their intrinsic content. If
all segments are fully specified in terms of the same features, and the evaluation
measure counts only the number of symbols, then there is no basis for evaluating
any segment as being more or less costly, or complex, than any other. As a result,
the SPE theory as presented in the previous eight chapters cannot account for
why certain segments are more common than others, or why certain segmental
inventories are common and others are not.
In addition, Chomsky and Halle observe that the problem is not limited to
inventories, but has implications for the functioning of phonological rules. They
present a number of examples, some of which are reproduced in (5.1), of pairs of
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