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This article surveys the history of contrast in phonology from Bell's Visible Speech (1867) until Chomsky & Halle's Sound Pattern of English (1968). Phonological contrast can be viewed at the segmental and subsegmental (feature) levels. As contrast at the segmental level involves the phoneme, whose later history has been extensively documented, I concentrate on the origins of the concept in the work of Sweet. Subsequently, I focus on subsegmental-level contrast. After a look at its treatment in phonological analyses that operated without an explicit theory of features, I turn to Trubetzkoy, in whose work we find the seeds of later approaches. The article explores the foundations of the main methods of computing contrastive features: minimal differences and hierarchical feature ordering. It concludes with a discussion of contrast in early generative phonology and reviews some of the reasons for its decline at the end of the 1960s.
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