Contrast and Phonological Activity in the Nez Perce Vowel System*

0. Introduction Features that pattern as inert with respect to phonological processes are often unnecessary in distinguishing segments in an inventory. A natural way of accounting for the phonological inertness of noncontrastive features is via underspecification. If noncontrastive features are absent from underlying representations and barred from the phonology, it follows that they will not be visible to phonological processes. However, there has been no consensus on how to determine which features are contrastive in any given case. This and other objections have detracted from the appeal of theories of underspecification. In Optimality Theory (OT, Prince and Smolensky 1993), moreover, representational devices such as underspecification and constraints on underlying forms have been generally rejected in favour of constraints on output forms. Inventories arise from constraint ranking, and the role of the inventory in determining phonological behaviour is therefore quite limited. However, the question of how to account for the relationship between contrast and phonological activity within OT remains open. The theory of the contrastive hierarchy (Jakobson and Halle 1956, Dresher 1998b, 2003) provides a method for determining contrasts in an inventory by ordering features so that some features take scope over others. This theory overcomes the major objections to underspecification theory, and connects contrast to phonological activity, because the size and shape of an inventory will affect the number of features needed in order for each segment to be contrastively specified. This paper provides an analysis of the Nez Perce vowel system within the framework of the contrastive hierarchy. Our analysis follows Jacobsen (1968), Rigsby and Silverstein (1969), Zwicky (1971), and Hall and Hall (1980) in assuming an abstract front vowel that participates in ATR harmony. In addition, we demonstrate that contrastive specifications are compatible with OT and can be achieved using mechanisms which are central to that theory, such as IDENT constraints and contextual markedness constraints.