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

many other theories that involve contrast, the basis for determining which
features are contrastive was not clear, and this led to serious ambiguities.
Consider again the marking statement in (5.17a), which states that no
value of [voiced] may be assigned to sonorants. We might think that this
condition follows directly from the fact that voicing is predictable on sonorants.
However, the matter is more complicated than that. Kiparsky 1985 contains an
extended analysis of ‘the notorious problem of voicing assimilation in Russian’
(cf. the rule of RVA in §4.6). The part of interest to the present discussion is his
treatment of the Russian sonorants and the ‘unpaired’ obstruents /ts, tS, x/.
Recall that both the sonorants and the unpaired obstruents have predictable
voicing; but whereas the sonorants do not participate in RVA, the unpaired
obstruents do. Kiparsky (1985: 108) proposes the marking statements in (5.18).
(5.18) Russian lexical conditions on marking (Kiparsky 1985)
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a. Marking condition on sonorants
* ⎡ α voiced ⎤
⎣ ⎢ +sonorant⎦
⎥
b. Marking condition on /ts, tS, x/
* ⎡ +voiced ⎤
⎢ –coronal ⎥
⎣ ⎢ +continuant⎦
⎥
The condition on sonorants (5.18a) is the same as for English sonorants
(5.17a). But
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the condition on the obstruents is crucially different: rather than
prohibiting them from bearing any specification for [voiced], it excludes only
[+voiced]. Kiparsky (1985: 136n13) notes that the condition is restricted in this
way to allow the obstruents to function as [–voiced] segments in the lexicon.
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