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

contrastive in a given language; that is, how they arrived at contrastive
specifications. One might come away from the previous chapter with the
impression that Martinet and Jakobson represented two different theoretical
positions (pairwise comparison versus feature ordering), and one might expect to
see arguments for and against these positions. However, this impression would
be incorrect. I will show on the contrary that explicit procedures for determining
contrasts were not formulated, and the authors I survey did not adopt clear-cut
or even consistent positions on this issue. Nevertheless, it is possible to see the
two basic approaches to contrast throughout this period.
This review of early work in phonology proceeds not just from a historical
interest. The third and most important aim is to recover fundamental insights
into the nature of contrast and its role in phonology that should form a part of
contemporary phonological theory. To this end, I will show the existence of what
appears to be a recurring pattern: when these theorists were thinking abstractly
about contrast, they tended to assume something like pairwise comparison; but
when they had empirical reasons for proposing contrastive specifications, they
tended to apply something like feature ordering. This result supports the
findings in the previous chapter that feature ordering is the only viable approach
to contrastive specification. Moreover, we will see that it is indispensable to
accounting for phonological patterning.
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