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

other possible positions of varying degrees of specificity. We could, for example,
focus on initial single consonants in monosyllables (pick, tail, comb, fuse, etc.), or
limit the vowel to [I] (pick, rig, win, fill, etc.), or further limit the final consonant to
[k] (pick, tick, wick, sick, etc.). A variety of prosodic and morphological
considerations may also play a role, allowing us to distinguish between stressed
and unstressed syllables, stems and affixes, and so on. 10
As in other matters concerning contrast, phonologists have not been
consistent in this regard. Unless the sets of relevant positions can be somehow
limited in reasonable ways, however, positionally-limited contrastive evaluation
can get out of hand. Therefore, for the most part I will continue to assume that
contrasts are defined globally for phonemes in inventories. However, we will
return to this topic in §7.5, where we will see that there is a place for positionally-
defined contrasts in phonology.
2.7.2. Types of features: Equipollent and privative
The SDA works on all types of features. For purposes of exposition I have been
assuming binary features, but this assumption is not crucial to the validity of the
arguments against the pairwise method. However, the type of feature adopted
can affect the results produced by the SDA, and for this reason it is worth
considering this issue here.
10 See Beckman (1997) and Dresher and van der Hulst (1998) for two approaches to picking out
positions that have a special status in the phonology.
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