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

captures the notion that A ‘stood outside the classes of timbre’ by ordering [low]
before [back]: thus, A has no contrastive value for [back] or [round]. Trubetzkoy
cites, as further evidence, the fact that the oppositions between back and front
vowels are constant, but those between rounded and unrounded vowels of the
same height are neutralizable after v and j to the unrounded vowels i and e^.
Because [back] is ordered ahead of [rounded], ‘the properties of lip participation
were phonologically irrelevant for the back vowels.’ That is, they have no
contrastive value for [round].
Though Trubetzkoy does not say so explicitly, it is clear that the vowels
/ü/ and /u/ do not form a bilateral opposition in this analysis of Polabian. Since
/u/ is not contrastively round, the two vowels have in common only the feature
[high], which they share with /i/. /i/ and /ü/, however, do form a bilateral
opposition based on the shared features [front] and [high].
Triangular vowel systems with an ‘indeterminate vowel’
In the case of Polabian, Trubetzkoy explicitly refers to a hierarchy of contrasts. In
other cases, he makes clear that different bilateral oppositions may be assigned to
inventories that look the same. This notion is not compatible with pairwise
comparisons, which would yield the same result for such inventories.
Consider first triangular vowel systems that have a central ‘indeterminate
vowel’, as in (3.14). If we assume that the relevant distinctive features are [low],
[high], [round], and [front], then the fully specified specifications of the vowels
in (3.14) are as in (3.15).
85