This article proposes that patterns of phonological contrast should be added to the list of factors that influence sound change. It adopts a hierarchically determined model of contrast that allows for a constrained degree of crosslinguistic variation in contrastive feature specifications. The predictions of this model are tested against a database comprising the set of vowel changes in the Algonquian languages. The model reveals striking commonalities in the underlying sources of these changes and straightforwardly predicts the previously unrecognized patterning of the languages into two groups: (i) those in which */ɛ/ tends to merge with */i/ and palatalization is triggered by */i/, and (ii) those in which */ɛ/ tends to merge with */a/ and palatalization is triggered by */ɛ/. In addition to providing a new argument for the relevance of contrast to phonology, the model also gives us a way to import traditional philological findings into a framework that brings them to bear on theoretical questions.

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Using data from agreement in three Algonquian languages (Ojibwe, Cheyenne, and Plains Cree), this squib shows that effects typically attributed to Chomsky’s ( 2000 , 2001 ) Activity Condition (AC) can vary not only across languages, as in Baker’s (2008b) macroparametric proposal, but within a language as well. AC effects are thus another instance in which an apparent macroparameter turns out, on closer inspection, to be a microparameter instead, as in prominent cases such as the pro-drop parameter and the polysynthesis parameter ( Kayne 2005 , Baker 2008a ).

This squib presents evidence from the Algonquian and Dene language families to support a connection between person and animacy. A range of morphosyntactic patterns in these languages, including pronoun inventories, agreement restrictions, and hierarchy effects, are argued to indicate that inanimate nominals lack formal person features. This proposal allows the morphosyntactic patterning of inanimates to fall out from grammatical principles that are independently required to account for person effects. We conclude that the often-assumed model in which third persons are "personless" must be revised to allow for languages in which only inanimate third persons lack formal person features.The squib is organized as follows. Section 1 provides background on person features and the notion of personlessness. Section 2 shows that various patterns in Algonquian and Dene morphosyntax follow from an analysis in which inanimate third persons are personless but animate third persons are specified for person. Section 3 considers whether the proposed person-animacy connection is conditioned by semantic animacy or grammatical animacy. *To Marie-Louise Bouvier White, Lena Drygeese, the late Archie Wedzin, and an anonymous consultant, masìcho for sharing your knowledge of the Tłıchǫ language. Special thanks and memory to Ojibwe language teachers Donald Keesig, Ella Waukey, and Berdina Johnston of Cape Croker. We thank the organizers and audience of "Gender, Class, and Determination: A Conference on the Nominal Spine", where we first presented this work, for excellent and stimulating feedback.

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