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

have the marked value [coronal]. As shown in (6.26), the predicted outcome is
now /i/, that is, [high, coronal]. In (6.26) only marked values are shown. A
constraint like *[coronal, –high] must be reformulated, assuming there is no
value [–high]. We still want to exclude the specification [coronal] in the absence
of [high]. We can recast the constraint in terms of licensing (cf. Itô, Mester and
Padgett 1995) as [coronal] ⊂ [high] (‘[coronal] must be licensed by [high]’), or as
a co-occurence constraint *[coronal, u high] (‘[coronal] may not be specified if
[high] is unspecified’).
[PUT (6.26) ABOUT HERE]
This brief discussion shows that the contrastive hierarchy by itself does
not dictate a particular approach to the question of how foreign sounds are
incorporated into a phonology. In conjunction with other concepts, such as
markedness, it does make available a range of empirical hypotheses.
Privative feature systems necessarily involve underspecification, as seen
in (6.26). Such underspecification is not particularly problematic in this context,
since it is permanent. Thus, the presence versus absence of a feature forms a
binary opposition, parallel to that between a plus and minus value of a feature.
In binary feature systems, however, underspecification takes on a different
status, creating in effect a ternary opposition between plus, minus, and zero. In
the next section we consider the effect of underspecified inputs in a binary
feature system.
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