Linguistics Seminar Series presents. What kinds of typological generalizations can we make about phonological inventories, and do such generalizations tell us anything about how phonemes are represented in the grammar? This talk begins by looking at some generalizations proposed by Bindseil (1838), Jakobson (1968), and Clements (2009), and then turns to the questions raised by inventories that appear to counterexemplify them, with particular reference to contrasts in place of articulation. I propose that the patterns can be understood in part through contrastive underspecification: representations of segments are no more detailed than they need to be in order to distinguish the members of the underlying inventory. In addition to shedding light on the typological patterns, this approach also contributes to an account of the behaviour of labialized dorsal consonants in Mohawk, Berber, and Nabak.