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

morphology and the lexicon, and exhibits properties such as cyclic application,
restriction to derived environments, and exceptions. Postlexical phonology
follows the lexical phonology and does not observe the above restrictions, having
rather properties one would associate with phonetic rules. 8
Most important with respect to our topic, Kiparsky (1982) argued that the
lexical phonology is the domain in which restrictions on feature specification
hold. For example, Kiparsky (1985) observes that voicing in English is distinctive
for obstruents but not sonorants. 9 Further, sonorants do not trigger or undergo
rules of voicing or devoicing in the lexical phonology of English, though they
may do so in the postlexical phonology (e.g., r may be devoiced in words like
cry).
Kiparsky (1985) proposes that these facts are connected. He suggests that
there exists a marking condition in English that prohibits voicing from being
8 Dresher (1983) argues that Biblical Hebrew postlexical phonology (in the sense of phonology
that takes place in a domain larger than the word, for example, the phonological phrase) exhibits
properties more usually associated with lexical phonology. This observation does not affect the
distinction between a phonological and phonetic component.
9 The example of [voiced] being predictable given [sonorant] is perhaps the oldest and most
common example of underspecification in the literature (cf. Stanley 1967). Nevertheless, it may
not be a good example if, as has been argued, sonorants do not have the same voicing feature as
voiced obstruents (Piggott 1992, Rice 1993, Avery 1996, Boersma 1998). For purposes of this
discussion, I will assume that sonorants do potentially bear a feature [voiced] that is also carried
by voiced obstruents. What is crucial here is the logic of the argument, whether or not sonorant
voicing is in fact a good exemplar of it.
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