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

Pairwise comparison seems to make sense, and it has been widely used in
phonology (not always explicitly) as a way to isolate contrastive features.
2.3. Contrastive specification by feature ordering
The above analysis of the contrastive features of the Standard French bilabial
consonants is not the only one in the literature. An entirely different analysis is
given by Jakobson and Lotz (1949). As with the Martinet example above, I will
focus only on their analysis of the bilabial consonants, extracting it from their
larger analysis of the contrasts in the French consonant system. I will also modify
their features to conform with the example we have been using; specifically, I
will continue to use [voiced] in place of their tense (tense stops are voiceless, non-
tense stops are voiced). With these adjustments, their analysis of the contrastive
features for the bilabial consonants is as in (2.5).
(2.5) Contrastive specifications for French bilabial stops (Jakobson and
Lotz 1949)
p b m
[voiced] – +
[nasal] – – +
Notice that the contrastive specifications in (2.5) differ from Martinet’s in
(2.1) in that /p/ in (2.5) is specified as [–nasal], a specification omitted in (2.1).
Jakobson and Lotz arrived at a different contrastive specification than Martinet
because they used a different method. They themselves do not make their
method explicit, but we can reconstruct it from later work by Jakobson and his
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