Contrastive hierarchies and phonological primes

Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (Dresher 2009, 2018; Hall 2007, 2011) builds on Jakobson’s (1941) basic insight that the contrasts of a language are organized in a hierarchical order. Contrastive Hierarchy Theory assumes that phonological primes are binary features, and in this sense parts company with versions of Element Theory and related approaches. Nevertheless, there are a number of affinities between Contrastive Hierarchy Theory and Element Theory, and in this paper I will try to highlight what I think are some points in common, as well as some differences. I will start in section 2 with a review of the main ideas that I take from Jakobson (1941), and briefly mention what became of these ideas in the 1950s and 1960s. In section 3, I set out the main tenets of Contrastive Hierarchy Theory, and in sections 4 and 5 I discuss the status of phonological primes (features in Contrastive Hierarchy Theory, elements in Element Theory) with respect to phonetics and substance-free phonology. I will show that Contrastive Hierarchy Theory and Element Theory have a similar approach to these issues, whether we take the primes to be features or elements. Section 6 focuses on threeand four-vowel systems, where there may or may not be an important difference between Contrastive Hierarchy Theory and Element Theory with respect to contrast. Then section 7 briefly surveys some five-vowel systems with the aim of showing that contrastive hierarchies must be allowed to vary from one language to another. Section 8 makes the same point with a diachronic example, showing how the five-vowel system of West Germanic reorganized its system of contrasts in early Old English. Section 9 considers the issue of binary features versus single-valued elements. Section 10 is a brief conclusion.