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

French contrastive feature hierarchy, (3.28) in the proposal of Jakobson and Lotz,
making a series of binary decisions: going top down, [N] is [–vocalic], [+nasal],
and [+saturated]. At this point there are no further contrastive features to be
assigned, and the English sound [N] is identified with the French phoneme /¯/. 27
7.7.2. Loanword adaptation in Polynesian languages (Herd 2005)
Herd (2005) studies patterns of adaptation of English words into a number of
Polynesian languages. These languages have impoverished consonantal
inventories, so many substitutions can be observed. Herd argues that the
adaptation patterns provide evidence for the influence of the contrastive
hierarchies of the borrowing languages à la Jakobson and Lotz. He argues further
that phonetic similarity is not sufficient to account for these patterns. Of the
many cases he discusses, I will briefly review the adaptation of coronal fricatives
into two Eastern Polynesian languages, Hawaiian and New Zealand Ma#ori.
27 In this case, we could question the strength of the argument by asking what other French
phoneme English [N] could be identified with. In the analysis of Martinet (1964), /¯/ is assigned a
[palatal] place, and the velars /k, g/ are [dorso-velar]. The combination of [dorso-velar, +nasal]
does not exist in native Standard French, and Martinet’s analysis does not suggest what strategy
would be employed by a French speaker in realizing this sound. If the place feature were
considered to be contrastively more important, we might expect it to override the nasal feature,
incorrectly yielding /g/ as the substitute for [N]. But it is not clear Martinet’s analysis would be
committed to this approach.
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