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

to /p/, that is, a voiceless nasal stop /m8/. Since there is no such phoneme in
French, /p/ is not contrastively non-nasal.
This method proceeds in terms of pairwise comparisons. It designates as
contrastive all and only features that serve to distinguish between pairs of
phonemes. An explicit algorithm for extracting contrastive features by this
method was proposed by Archangeli (1988). 1 I will call this the Pairwise
Algorithm, given in (2.4).
(2.4) Pairwise Algorithm (Archangeli 1988)
a. Fully specify all segments.
b. Isolate all pairs of segments.
c. Determine which segment pairs differ by a single feature
specification.
d. Designate such feature specifications as ‘contrastive’ on the
members of that pair.
e. Once all pairs have been examined and appropriate feature
specifications have been marked ‘contrastive’, delete all
unmarked feature specifications on each segment.
1 Archangeli (1988) presents this algorithm as part of an argument against the sort of contrastive
specification proposed by Steriade (1987). Her argument is that the algorithm is faulty, and hence
so is contrastive specification. I will show that that while the algorithm, and the general approach
it instantiates, are indeed faulty, contrastive specification does not necessarily depend on this
approach. A more elaborate algorithm was formulated by van den Broecke (1976); see §2.5.5
below for discussion.
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