This paper offers a novel account of a familiar typological observation, namely the tendency of phonological inventories to consist of segments that are dispersed through the available auditory space. In contrast to previous approaches, which have treated dispersion as a goal explicitly encoded in the grammar, this paper shows that the cross-linguistic pattern follows automatically from the interaction of two independently motivated factors: phonological representations in which only contrastive features are specified, and the enhancement of these features in phonetic implementation. The merits of this approach are illustrated by examples involving both vocalic and consonantal inventories.

This chapter sheds light on the crosslinguistically robust, but not total, complementarity between plurality and classifiers by proposing a formal representation of plurality and classification as two separate aspects of individuation, the semantic property that characterizes count nouns cross-linguistically. Drawing on data from English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Armenian, Korean, and Persian, the chapter argues that the differences among these languages can be reduced to a small number of differences in a) which features the language makes use of, b) which of those features can project as syntactic heads, and c) the status of non-projecting features as modifiers or head features. Under the proposed analysis, it is not necessary that a language be characterizable, as a whole, as a classifier language or as a plural-marking language. Rather, classifiers and plural marking may coexist in a language as long as only one appears in any given nominal.

This paper addresses two fundamental questions about the nature of formal features in phonology and morphosyntax: what is their expressive power, and where do they come from? To answer these questions, we begin with the most restrictive possible hypothesis (all features are privative, and are wholly dictated by Universal Grammar, with no room for cross-linguistic variation), and examine the extent to which empirical evidence from a variety of languages compels a retreat from this position. We argue that there is little to be gained by positing a universal set of specific features, and propose instead that the crucial contribution of UG is the language learner's ability to construct features by identifying correlations between contrasts at different levels of linguistic structure. This view resonates with current research on how the interaction between UG and external 'third factors' shapes the structure of language, while at the same time harking back to the Saussurean notion that contrast is the central function of linguistic representations.

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The fundamental idea underlying the use of distinctive features in phonology is the proposition that the same phonetic properties that distinguish one phoneme from another also play a crucial role in accounting for phonological patterns. Phonological rules and constraints apply to natural classes of segments, expressed in terms of features, and involve mechanisms, such as spreading or agreement, that copy distinctive features from one segment to another. Contrastive specification builds on this by taking seriously the idea that phonological features are distinctive features. Many phonological patterns appear to be sensitive only to properties that crucially distinguish one phoneme from another, ignoring the same properties when they are redundant or predictable. For example, processes of voicing assimilation in many languages apply only to the class of obstruents, where voicing distinguishes phonemic pairs such as /t/ and /d/, and ignore sonorant consonants and vowels, which are predictably voiced. In theories of contrastive specification, features that do not serve to mark phonemic contrasts (such as [+voice] on sonorants) are omitted from underlying representations. Their phonological inertness thus follows straightforwardly from the fact that they are not present in the phonological system at the point at which the pattern applies, though the redundant features may subsequently be filled in either before or during phonetic implementation. In order to implement a theory of contrastive specification, it is necessary to have a means of determining which features are contrastive (and should thus be specified) and which ones are redundant (and should thus be omitted). A traditional and intuitive method involves looking for minimal pairs of phonemes: if [±voice] is the only property that can distinguish /t/ from /d/, then it must be specified on them. This approach, however, often identifies too few contrastive features to distinguish the phonemes of an inventory, particularly when the phonetic space is sparsely populated. For example, in the common three-vowel inventory /i a u/, there is more than one property that could distinguish any two vowels: /i/ differs from /a/ in both place (front versus back or central) and height (high versus low), /a/ from /u/ in both height and rounding, and /u/ from /i/ in both rounding and place. Because pairwise comparison cannot identify any features as contrastive in such cases, much recent work in contrastive specification is instead based on a hierarchical sequencing of features, with specifications assigned by dividing the full inventory into successively smaller subsets. For example, if the inventory /i a u/ is first divided according to height, then /a/ is fully distinguished from the other two vowels by virtue of being low, and the second feature, either place or rounding, is contrastive only on the high vowels. Unlike pairwise comparison, this approach produces specifications that fully distinguish the members of the underlying inventory, while at the same time allowing for the possibility of cross-linguistic variation in the specifications assigned to similar inventories.