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

than a single feature. There is no reason in principle why pairwise comparison
must be limited in this way. To deal with situations where members of an
inventory are distinguished by more than one feature, there must be a way of
selecting one of them as being contrastive. The simplest way to do this is to order
the features, selecting the feature that is highest in the ordering. But this is to
adopt feature ordering, and makes pairwise comparison superfluous.
A sophisticated version of pairwise comparison was devised by van den
Broecke (1976: 33–34). He wrote a computer program that takes as input a
phonological inventory with fully specified feature matrices, with the aim of
arriving at a set of contrastive specifications. The first step of this algorithm is
equivalent to the Pairwise Algorithm, except that for each pair of phonemes the
program records every feature that distinguishes the two. As in the Pairwise
Algorithm, features that uniquely distinguish a pair of phonemes are designated
as contrastive for that pair.
But whereas the Pairwise Algorithm stops at this point, van den Broecke’s
program is just getting started. If a pair of phonemes is distinguished by more
than one feature, but one of those features has already been marked as
contrastive for another pair, then that feature is selected. If none of the
distinguishing features has been marked as contrastive elsewhere, then the
program creates several columns and in each column marks one of the features
as contrastive and the others as redundant. These columns multiply as a function
of the number of such choices. For example, for an English inventory of 48
phonemes characterized by 14 distinctive features, van den Broecke reports that
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