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

analysis is ‘abstract’ with respect to the surface phonetics, the analysis is
committed to specify the fourth vowel phoneme only as being not low, not labial,
and not coronal (i.e., some non-low unrounded central vowel). 7
These contrastive marked values account for the fact that /i/ can trigger
palatalization, as it has a relevant contrastive feature. The fourth vowel is the
least marked, literally, and therefore cannot trigger palatalization, and is more
susceptible to receive features from the context.
In over half of the Inuit dialects from Alaska to Labrador there is no
longer any distinction between two kinds of i: in all these dialects, etymological
*/i/ and etymological */´/ have merged completely to i. 8 It is a striking fact that
none of these dialects has consonant palatalization triggered by /i/ (Compton
and Dresher 2008). Compton and Dresher (2008) posit that [low] and [labial] are
ordered ahead of [coronal] in the contrastive hierarchy of the Inuit language
family; with only three vowels in the inventory, only the former two features can
be contrastive, as shown in (7.5). Lacking a contrastive feature, /i/ can no longer
trigger palatalization. This analysis thus explains a conspicuous gap in the
typology of Inuit dialects: there are palatalizing dialects with four underlying
vowels, and non-palatalizing dialects with three underlying vowels, but no
palatalizing dialects with three underlying vowels.
7 See Archangeli and Pulleyblank (1994: 73–84) for an analysis that is similar in spirit, but
proceeding from different theoretical assumptions.
8 See Dorais 2003 for a survey.
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