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

discussed above. I will show that, if these processes are supposed to affect
segments that are most similar to each other, then the similarity metric makes the
wrong predictions in each case.
8.4.1. Vowel harmony
We observed (§7.4) that the vowels that trigger ATR and labial harmony in
Classical Manchu are just those that are contrastively specified for the [ATR] and
[labial] features, respectively. Specifically, the vowels /u/ and /´/ are specified
for a contrastive [ATR] feature, and may not co-occur with /U/ and /a/, which
are contrastively non-ATR. The vowel /i/ is not contrastively specified for
[ATR], and may co-occur with any of the above vowels. The feature [labial]
contrastively distinguishes between /ç/ and /a/, and these are the only vowels
that participate in labial harmony in Classical Manchu.
On the assumption that ATR harmony targets vowels that are highly
similar to each other, we expect that /u/, /´/, /U/, and /a/ should all be more
similar to each other than any of them are to /i/. Of course we expect /u/ to be
very similar to /U/, and /´/ to be very similar to /a/, since these vowels are
distinguished only by the feature [ATR]; any feature-based theory would derive
this result. The test of the theory is whether /u/ and /U/are also similar to /´/
and /a/.
To test this prediction, I computed similarity measures for the vowels of
Classical Manchu, using the features in (8.21), which mirror the features used by
Zhang (1996). Following the usual practice in Structured Specification theory
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