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

These two concepts have not always been linked in phonological theory.
On the contrary, they have more usually been dissociated, with sometimes one,
sometimes the other coming to the fore. The story that emerges from the
preceding chapters can be summed up as follows. Something like the
Contrastivist Hypothesis was adopted by the principal phonological theorists in
the first half of the twentieth century, but the notion of a contrastive hierarchy
remained inchoate. Though it played an implicit role in the most interesting
structuralist contrastivist analyses, it remained unformulated, and competed
with a pairwise approach that saw contrast in terms of logical redundancy and
minimal pairs.
The 1950s were a turning point. For the first time the contrastive hierarchy
was explicitly proposed as governing feature specifications. At the same time,
however, the Contrastivist Hypothesis began to be deemphasized. The
contrastive hierarchy came to be viewed mainly as a way of minimizing
redundancies in phonological specifications, not as a way of capturing
phonological generalizations. The Contrastivist Hypothesis was abandoned in
early generative phonology, and when redundant feature values were shown to
cause technical and empirical problems, the contrastive hierarchy also
disappeared from phonological theory.
But not entirely. In Chapters 5 and 6 I traced the influence of these
concepts in generative phonology and in Optimality Theory. As in earlier
incarnations of phonological theory, they went their separate ways. When
something approximating the Contrastivist Hypothesis was proposed, the
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