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

feature [high], the contrastively [labial] vowel is enhanced by [back], and the
non-labial non-low vowel is enhanced by the place feature [coronal].
Enhancement thus also partly accounts for why certain inventories are
more common than others; why, for example, /i, a, u/ is more common than /´,
a, u/ or /ˆ, a, u/ (on this, see further §8.3).
7.2.3.2. Phonetics in phonology versus phonological minimalism
MCS was developed in the context of works that argue that the phonology is
underspecified with respect to phonetics; in addition to the papers on
enhancement mentioned above, these include Keating 1988, Cohn 1993, and
Lahiri and Reetz 2002. Kingston and Diehl 1994 also argue that an elaborate
phonetic component is required to complement the phonology.
These were followed by proposals that aim to diminish or eliminate the
distance between phonetics and phonology by arguing that noncontrastive
phonetic features play a role in phonology (e.g., Steriade 1997, Boersma 1998,
Kirchner 1997, 1998, Flemming 2001, 2002), and that much that goes on in
phonology is sensitive to detailed phonetic information (Pierrehumbert,
Beckman and Ladd 2000, Hayes, Kirchner and Steriade 2004). It should be
emphasized that the Contrastivist Hypothesis does not require lexical
representations to be free of redundancy. As argued in Chapter 2, the aim of the
SDA is not to eliminate logical redundancy, but to identify contrastive
specifications. Nor is anything in the theory based on an assumption that the
brain has limited storage capacity. The claim that the phonological component
assigns a special role to contrastive specifications is an empirical hypothesis
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