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

of underspecification theory and left it vulnerable to critiques that
underspecification has no principled basis and is empirically flawed.
5.3.1. Lexical Phonology and Structure Preservation
In a series of groundbreaking papers in the early 1980s, Paul Kiparsky was able
to overcome Stanley’s arguments and reintroduce underspecification into
generative phonology. Kiparsky achieved this by means of a number of
theoretical innovations. Kiparsky (1982) proposed that Stanley’s objection against
underspecification on the grounds that it allows for the ternary use of binary
features can be answered if the phonology is restricted to specify only one lexical
feature value, usually the marked one, in any given context. Thus, if [+F] is
specified, [–F] is barred, and vice-versa. The result is that there is an underlying
binary contrast between [+F] and 0 or [–F] and 0, but no ternary contrast between
[+F], [–F], and 0 in any given context.
To complete the argument, it is also necessary to prevent the creation of a
ternary contrast from arising in the course of the derivation. In the SPE
conception of phonology this poses a problem, because unspecified values must
be filled in at some point in order to arrive at a phonetic representation. Kiparsky
drew together diverse streams of research in morphology and phonology into a
theory he called Lexical Phonology, also known as Lexical Phonology and
Morphology (LPM, Pesetsky 1979, Kiparsky 1982, 1985, Kaisse and Shaw 1985,
Mohanan 1986). LPM posits that there is a fundamental distinction between
lexical and postlexical phonology. Lexical phonology interacts with the
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