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

Hume 1995, Halle 1995), Government Phonology (Kaye, Lowenstamm and
Vergnaud 1985), Dependency Phonology (Anderson and Ewen 1987), and
Radical CV Phonology (van der Hulst 1995, 1996, 2005). It is not possible to
discuss all these theories here. Rather, I will focus on how a theory of feature
organization might be related to the contrastive hierarchy.
5.4.1. Feature geometry
What has come to be known as ‘feature geometry’ developed as an extension
and generalization of the theory of Autosegmental Phonology (Goldsmith 1976),
which starts with the observation that certain features, notably tone, are
relatively autonomous of the other segmental features. In their review and
synthesis of a number of approaches to feature geometry, Clements and Hume
(1995: 245–6) write, ‘Earlier theoreticians tended to think of phonemes as
unstructured sets of features, or ‘feature bundles’ in Bloomfield’s well-known
characterization. In accordance with this view, later work in the Jakobsonian and
generative traditions treated segments as feature columns with no internal
structure.’ 15
One obvious similarity between feature geometry and the contrastive
hierarchy is that they both encode hierarchical relations between features. In
15 As we have seen, this summary is not entirely correct. Jakobson and early generative
phonology did experiment with a hierarchical approach to features in terms of the contrastive
hierarchy.
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