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

6.7. Underspecified inputs
The notion of ‘richness of the base’ can be extended to include not just illicit
combinations of fully specified features, but also underspecified inputs; by
‘underspecified’ I mean here underspecified relative to the representations
derived by the contrastive hierarchy. Whereas inputs consisting of illicit
combinations of features can be interpreted as foreign sounds being presented to
a speaker, it is less obvious in what actual or hypothetical situations a speaker
will be presented with an underspecified input. Since it is not possible to isolate
individual features in any percept that a speaker can actually be exposed to, it is
hard to imagine under what circumstances speakers — let us say of Classical
Manchu, to continue with our example — might interpret a vowel that sounds
something like [a] as consisting only of the feature [+low], rather than, as
required by the contrastive hierarchy, [+low, –labial, –ATR].
Nevertheless, richness of the base has been a basic part of the conceptual
system of OT, so let us see what the consequences are of allowing such inputs. In
(6.27), an underspecified input consisting only of [+low] is provided as an input
to the constraint system we have been using for Classical Manchu.
[PUT (6.27) ABOUT HERE]
The constraint system developed so far does not adequately deal with
underspecified representations. The high ranking of MAX [low] ensures that the
underlying specification [+low] is maintained, and the next highest-ranking
constraint, *[coronal, +low], rules out any output that contains a coronal feature
specification. Beyond these requirements, however, the only constraint that plays
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