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

consideration. Once the vowel is designated [–high], any specification for
[round] must be filtered out, and the result would be [–high], that is, /a/.
Again, this is perhaps the right outcome. But one can imagine a different
outcome, whereby the [+round] specification is perceived by L1 speakers as
being more salient than the height feature. If the priority is to retain this [+round]
specification, then necessarily the height feature will have to be adjusted, giving
the output [+high, +round], that is, /u/.
This scenario raises the question of the relation between salience and the
contrastive hierarchy. On the approach taken here, saliency is closely tied up
with the contrastive hierarchy. Now it could be that salience is to some extent
free of language-particular hierarchies. In that case, the contrastive hierarchy and
salience would be two coexisting dimensions that each contribute in different
degrees to various aspects of the phonology. To the extent that salience would
also have to be organized into a hierarchy (to sort out what happens when two
features are both salient but conflicting), it would of course be more desirable,
from a theoretical point of view, if the contrastive and salience hierarchies could
be conflated, or at least related to one another. The matter is, however, empirical,
and will ultimately be decided on the evidence.
Before leaving this topic, it is worth pointing to a third position, one
which relates salience to the contrastive hierarchy, but which also assigns a role
to markedness.
Let us suppose that for each binary feature, one value is unmarked
(default) and the other is marked. A more radical implementation of this idea is
243