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

Kiparsky’s analysis thus mirrors that of Halle (1959) in some respects while
retaining something of the older distinction between the morphophonemic and
phonemic components. As in Halle’s account, unpaired obstruents are
unspecified in the lexicon for [voiced] because they are predictably voiceless, but
are allowed to take on the value [–voiced] in time to participate in RVA. With the
structuralists, however, Kiparsky proposes that their voiced allophones are
prohibited from the lexical phonology, but are derived by a postlexical
application of RVA.
The question remains, however, as to what principle explains the
difference in the marking conditions in (5.18). It does not follow from
predictability, because it is equally predictable that sonorants are voiced and that
unpaired obstruents are voiceless. Therefore, something beyond predictability
must be involved. A contrastive feature hierarchy provides a rationale: if the
Russian feature hierarchy has [sonorant] ordered ahead of [voiced], and [voiced]
is ordered ahead of the features that isolate the phonemes /ts, tS, x/ from the
other coronals, then the two groups of consonants can be seen to stand in a very
different relation to the feature [voiced], as shown in (5.19).
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