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

comparison when the former alone is sufficient. The most important objection,
however, is empirical: this theory does not allow for variation in the feature
hierarchy, and so will arrive at the same contrastive relations for every similar-
looking inventory. We have seen throughout that this is an undesirable result.
Curiously, Calabrese (2005: 430–433) levels the same objection against the
theory in Dresher 2002, the same as the one being advocated here. Calabrese first
mischaracterizes it as being identical to the approach taken in Clements 2001,
which he considers to be a simpler reformulation of Dresher 2002. We have seen
that a crucial difference between Clements’s approach and the one taken here is
that Clements assumes a universal feature ordering (the robustness scale) that
does not take phonological activity into account, whereas I assume that the
feature order is variable, and that the chief source of evidence for what the
hierarchy is in a language derives from the pattern of phonological activity in
that language.
Calabrese observes, correctly, that if we suppose that [back] is universally
ordered above [round], then the SDA will assign the contrastive feature [–back]
to both i and y in (8.37), as we can see in (8.38a). He observes, also correctly, that
this is the wrong result for languages like Finnish and Hungarian which have
palatal (front/back) harmony, in which the front unrounded vowel /i/ is
neutral. The correct analysis is one in which the front unrounded vowels are not
contrastively specified for the harmonizing feature, which requires the ordering
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