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

all logical redundancies, nor does it equate system redundancy with
predictability.
–voice]
Steriade (1995: 118–119) observes that a constraint of the form *[+sonorant,
renders predictable not only the voicing of sonorants but also the
sonority of voiceless segments. Must we then leave the [–sonorant]
value of p, t, k out of the underlying representations? There seems
to be little evidence for such a move and we need to ask why,
especially as there exists substantial evidence for leaving the
sonorants unspecified for [voice] (Kiparsky 1985; Itô and Mester
1986).
Similarly, she observes that either [back] or [round], but not both , can be omitted
from the specifications of the non-low vowels in triangular systems such as /i, e,
a, o, u/; the choice of which to omit thus appears to her to be arbitrary.
As we have seen, this type of problem is solved by the contrastive
hierarchy in conjunction with the Contrastivist Hypothesis. The feature
[sonorant] is a major class feature that is typically higher in the hierarchy than
[voiced]; in the typical case where all sonorants are voiced, [voiced] is not
contrastive in the [+sonorant] set, but is in the [–sonorant] set. The fact that
[–voiced] segments are predictably [–sonorant] plays no role in their
specification, according to the SDA. To have a situation where [sonorant] is
omitted from voiceless consonants, we would need a feature hierarchy with
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