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

RU does not fully adopt the Contrastivist Hypothesis, for it places severe
limits on the extent to which aspects of phonological activity besides epenthesis
are considered evidence for underlying specifications. In RU, the notion of
contrast is not explicitly mentioned in the characterization of either default or
complement rules, nor is there explicitly a contrastive hierarchy. Most central to
the Contrastivist perspective, it can be shown that RU does not systematically
distinguish between contrastive and redundant feature values.
Consider, for example, the vowel system of Spanish, which has the feature
specifications shown in (5.22a). In Spanish the epenthetic vowel is /e/. One way
of guaranteeing that /e/ is completely unspecified is to disallow specification of
any values that /e/ has in its full specification. In this case, these values are all
[–F] for every feature, F, in (5.22). A consequence is that these values cannot be
specified on any other vowel, either. The result of removing these values is
(5.22b). Each removal requires the formation of a complement rule (5.22c). 11
11 The complement rules in (5.22c) are all context free. There are other ways to ensure that /e/ is
unspecified. One could, for example, adopt context-sensitive complement rules that more closely
resemble the markedness rules discussed in the previous chapter (see further Mohanan 1991).
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