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

members of a contrast receive a feature value, leaving it unclear which of the
phonemes that are unmarked for a feature are in the scope of the contrast and
which fall outside it. It follows that if it is important to know the scope of a
contrast and which segments it affects in a privative feature system, we will have
to keep track of this information with some machinery in addition to the
representations themselves.
2.7.3. Contrast and underspecification
There is a natural, but by no means necessary, connection between contrast and
underspecification. In a theory where contrastive feature specifications are
assigned hierarchically by the SDA, it is natural to suppose that contrastive
specifications are specified and redundant specifications are unspecified.
Consider again our example of bilabial stops /p, b, m/, assuming an ordering
[nasal] > [voiced]; the contrastive specifications are as in (2.5). It is natural to
assume that the contrastive feature values in (2.5) are specified whereas the
redundant values (in this case, the feature [+voiced] for /m/) are unspecified.
This is not necessarily the case, however. We have seen that it is not necessary for
all contrastive values to be specified. In a privative feature system, only marked
contrastive values are specified, as in (2.30b).
In (2.30), representations are underspecified beyond the requirements of
contrast, by omitting also unmarked contrastive specifications. The converse is
also theoretically possible: representations may be specified over and above the
requirements of contrast. Thus, it is possible to interpret the SDA not as an
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