“Clements’ Economy Theory, Contrastive Hierarchies and Distinctive Features”
Mark Koranda, Calvin Kosmatka and Eric Raimy
The poster, to be presented at the 2017 Mid-continental Phonetics Conference, compares the implications of two approaches to phonological features, the ‘naive phonetic’ descriptive system used by UPSID, and that proposed by Avery and Idsardi (2001; AI) for 213 distinct vowel inventories (Maddieson, 1984). We analyze three metrics for each vowel inventory using the Koranda-Kosmatka Dresher Machine which applies the successive division algorithm (Dresher, 2009) to UPSID and AI. We present measures of ‘Feature Bounding’, ‘Feature Economy’, and ‘Marked Feature Avoidance’ for both systems.
