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

this book, it is preferable to relax the strong Contrastivist Hypothesis in less
drastic ways first, if necessary, for example as proposed in §7.9.
Like MCS, Clements (2001) assumes that contrastive specifications at the
lexical level are introduced by means of a feature hierarchy, called an accessibility
hierarchy in Clements 2001; it is slightly revised and called a robustness scale in
Clements 2004. This scale is presented in (8.30).
(8.30) Robustness Scale for consonant features (Clements 2004: 31)
a. [±sonorant]
[labial]
[coronal]
[dorsal]
b. [±continuant]
[±posterior]
c. [±voiced]
[±nasal]
d. [glottal]
e. others
Unlike the assumption pursued here that the contrastive hierarchy may
vary cross-linguistically, Clements assumes that the robustness scale is universal.
The empirical import of this claim is substantially weakened by condition (b) in
(8.29) , however: since phonological activity is not evidence bearing on which
features are contrastive, it is difficult to prove or disprove any proposed set of
contrastive features for a particular language.
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