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

7.5.3. Summary
The generalizations that govern Romance metaphony support the Contrastivist
Hypothesis in striking fashion. As predicted, only contrastive features can trigger
metaphony. These dialects also exemplify situations where contrast is not
evaluated over the entire inventory, but over two different domains; in this case,
the desinential vowels are evaluated apart from all the other vowels. These
examples also provide evidence that the phonetic realization of a desinential
vowel does not predict whether it can be a metaphony trigger. Further, the level
at which contrast is required is not at the surface phonetics, but in the underlying
lexical representations.
7.6. Consonant co-occurrence restrictions (Mackenzie 2005)
Mackenzie (2005, forthcoming) argues that the best analysis of many consonant
harmony systems requires specifying certain features as contrastive in terms of a
feature hierarchy. For then a simple generalization emerges: consonant harmony
applies to segments contrastively specified for the harmonic feature.
In Bumo Izon (an Ijoid language of Nigeria), labial and alveolar implosive
and plosive stops may not co-occur in a morpheme (Efere 2001). Thus, implosive
/∫, Î/ may not co-occur with plosive /b, d/, though the plosives may freely
occur with each other, as may the implosives (7.55).
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