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

contrastive features to the stem-final /t/ when it is word final and when it is
word medial. 25
A second condition that could be plausibly put on a contrastive domain is
that it should correspond to a category that has independent existence in the
grammar. This condition would rule out arbitrary domains such as, for English,
the set of consonants that could precede the sequence ___et ( pet, vet, Tet, debt, set,
net, yet, get etc.) within a word.
The conditions for having separate contrastive domains for evaluating
vowels are met in Romance languages that distinguish between stem vowels and
desinential vowels. Desinential vowels occur in a closed class of suffixes and do
not alternate with stem vowels. Moreover, stems and desinences constitute
important grammatical categories in such languages. Dyck (1995) and Frigeni
(2003) argue that contrastive specifications must be assigned separately to
25 The assumption that morphemes have a unique lexical form is not universally held. In theories
that permit multiple lexical representations the concept of a phonological inventory would have
to be rethought along with what constitutes a permissible contrastive domain.
Keeping now to the principle that morphemes have unique underlying forms, it may still
be the case that children at early stages of acquisition may not yet relate different forms of
morphemes. For example, they may have different lexical representations for the final consonant
in write and the medial consonant in writer (since writer is not yet decomposed into separate
morphemes it is not accurate to label the t in writer as ‘stem final’ for these learners). It follows
that child grammar may have separate sub-inventories and contrastive domains that would not
be permitted in the adult grammar.
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