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

7. Evidence for the Contrastive Hierarchy in Phonology
7.1. Introduction
In §3.7 I sketched the outlines of a theory of phonology that was distilled from
the leading ideas discussed in Chapter 3. This theory adopts the Contrastivist
Hypothesis, which holds that phonology computes only contrastive features. It
determines what the contrastive features in a language are by applying the SDA
to a contrastive feature hierarchy for that language. In keeping with the
Contrastivist Hypothesis, phonological activity serves as the chief heuristic for
determining what the feature hierarchy is for a given language.
Though the ingredients for such a theory were in place by the 1930s,
phonological theory did not develop in this direction; why it did not was the
subject of chapters 4–6. These chapters show that the theory of §3.7 has never
properly been put to the test. In this chapter I argue that these ideas remain
viable and indispensable to an explanatory theory of phonology.
Of course, any contemporary effort to implement such a theory must take
account of advances in phonology since the 1930s. For example, the diagnostic
given in (3.38d), that a contrastive feature must be present in all the allophones of
a phoneme, is not consistent with the generative phonological conception that
phonology is relatively abstract with respect to phonetics. In keeping with
Chomsky and Halle’s arguments against taxonomic phonemics, it is unlikely that
we can put limits on the degree to which a segment may be modified in the
course of a derivation. But the principle in (3.38d) may still have some heuristic
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