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

As mentioned, however, the SPE-Kean approach to markedness does not
really do the same work as the contrastive hierarchy, because it does not take
account of language-particular contrasts. One disadvantage of this kind of
approach to markedness is that it treats markedness as universal, whereas there
is evidence that it is relative to a particular inventory. We will return to this
subject in Chapter 7, where I will argue that that the ‘complexity’ of a segment is
not fixed universally, but varies with the particular contrasts in play in an
inventory. As we will see, /ˆ/ is more marked than /i/ in the sense that the
latter occurs more frequently in vowel inventories; but when both /i/ and /ˆ/
occur in the same inventory, it is /ˆ/ that functions like the less marked vowel.
This kind of fact cannot be captured by a markedness scale like that in (5.14).
5.3. Contrast and underspecification
In the early 1980s the old arguments against underspecification began to lose
their force, and underspecification was reintroduced to the theory. However, it
did not come back in the form of a contrastive hierarchy. I will argue in what
follows that, like the pre-generative phonologists before them, underspecification
theorists associated with one of the two main theories of underspecification,
Radical Underspecification, did not pay sufficient attention to the notion of
contrast. This was a point also made by advocates of the other prominent
approach to underspecification, Contrastive Specification; I will argue that the
latter, however, did not pay sufficient attention to how contrasts are established.
The lack of an adequate theory of contrast hindered the subsequent development
183