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

marked on sonorants in the lexicon (5.17a). He proposes further to extend this
prohibition throughout the lexical phonology, a constraint he calls Structure
Preservation (5.17b).
(5.17) Underspecification and Structure Preservation (Kiparsky 1985: 92)
a. Marking condition: *[αvoiced, +sonorant] in the lexicon.
b. Structure Preservation: Marking conditions such as (5.17a) must
be applicable not only to underived lexical representations but
also to derived lexical representations including the output of
word-level rules.
The marking condition in (5.17a), together with Structure Preservation
(5.17b), accounts for the fact that English lexical voicing assimilation is triggered
by and applies to obstruents, not sonorants. The marking condition (5.17a) is
possible because voicing on sonorants is predictable.
The rationale for this proposal is that there is a deep connection between
predictability of feature specifications and phonological behaviour: predictable
features are not present in the phonology, and thus the phonology has no access
to them. The fact that voicing rules do not need to explicitly exclude sonorants is
thus a real generalization, not a ‘specious’ one, as Stanley (1967) claimed.
In connecting predictability to underspecification, and enforcing this
underspecification throughout the lexical phonology, LPM comes close to
incorporating the Contrastivist Hypothesis, because the features in play in the
lexical phonology are contrastive, to a first approximation. However, as with
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