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

these phonemes will be designated as redundant, with the result that a
redundant feature triggers assimilation, in violation of the Contrastivist
Hypothesis. Adopting the contrastive hierarchy as the procedure for assigning
contrasts results in a different conclusion: the features in question are contrastive,
and there is no violation of the Contrastivist Hypothesis.
To take another example, Yowlumne labial harmony is triggered by both
/o/ and /u/. A number of theories to be discussed in Chapter 8 find that the
[labial] (or [+round]) specification on /u/ is redundant; this could be because
[back] must take precedence over [round], or because /u/ is not sufficiently
‘crowded’, or because [labial] is not the sole feature that distinguishes /u/ from
any other phoneme, and so on. In any such theory the crucial harmonic feature is
noncontrastive. But in the approach taken here [labial] is ordered high enough in
the feature hierarchy to be contrastive on both /u/ and /o/, and there is no
violation of the Contrastivist Hypothesis. 29
It is only to be expected that there will be many such cases, given the
widespread use of pairwise comparison in determinations of which features are
contrastive. Therefore, many apparent violations of the Contrastivist Hypothesis
can be resolved with a different, arguably more empirically adequate,
assignment of contrastive feature specifications.
Another source of uncertainty concerns the dividing point between the
phonological component, in which only contrastive features are computed, and
29 Yowlumne does pose a real problem, however, which is discussed in §7.9.3.
335