Past Event

On the Role and Evaluation of Contrast in Phonology

B. Elan Dresher
Professor Emeritus of Linguistics
(University of Toronto)

In this talk I will present the main components of Modified Contrastive Specification (MCS, aka what some of us do in Toronto) as it touches on the role and evaluation of contrast in phonology (Avery & Rice 1989; Dresher, Piggott & Rice 1994; Dresher & Rice 2007; Hall 2007; Dresher 2009; Mackenzie 2009).  I will argue for the following positions:

• Phonetic contrast is not the same as phonological contrast.
• Contrastive features are determined by feature ordering (a contrastive hierarchy), not by minimal contrasts.
• Contrastive hierarchies (i.e., the ordering of features), can vary cross-linguistically.
• The Contrastivist Hypothesis: only contrastive features can be active in the phonology.
• Corollary: to identify contrastive features, look for activity.
• The enhancement of contrastive features can account for surface effects like dispersion.

I will illustrate these points with a number of case studies, including the vowel systems of Turkish and Catalan, Yoruba vowel harmony, consonant co-occurrence restrictions in Nilotic, and the East Slavic post-velar fronting.

About the Presenter

B. Elan Dresher is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. He has made significant contributions to many areas of theoretical phonology, historical linguistics, and learnability. Most recently, he has produced an influential body of work on the most fundamental question of phonology – the theory of contrast.