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

There are different kinds of binary features. 11 The kind discussed above
have two values, one positive and one negative. As long as we do not attribute
special status to + or –, the two values of a binary feature have equal status. To
borrow the Prague School term (Trubetzkoy 1969), such features are equipollent.
The [+F] ~ [–F] notation introduces an inherent asymmetry, however:
[+voiced] feels psychologically different than [–voiceless], because each names
the feature after a different one of its values. It is a small step to suppose that the
two values are not equal in status. One could be the default, or unmarked, value,
and the other could be the marked value. The terms ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ are
also borrowed from the Prague School, who took it somewhat literally, as
meaning that an unmarked feature value is simply not indicated, whereas a
marked value is indicated by a mark. This kind of contrast can be represented as
Ø ~ [F], where Ø represents the absence of a mark and [F] is the marked value. In
Prague School terminology, this kind of binary contrast is called privative.
Privative contrasts impose more structure on representations than
equipollent ones, and hence require more information. To make an equipollent
contrast between nasal and oral, it is enough to write [+nasal] ~ [–nasal], or,
equivalently, [–oral] ~ [+oral] (which name we choose has no significance). To
make a privative contrast, we have to decide which is the marked feature.
11 It is also possible to have multi-valued features, either discrete or continuous. There have been
proposals that multi-valued, even continuous, features play a role in linguistic theory (Broe and
Pierrehumbert 2000, Pierrehumbert, Beckman and Ladd 2000). Nevertheless, I will continue to
assume that phonological features are discrete and mainly binary.
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