Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

compared to /a/, he writes that “the tongue ... is pulled slightly back, while (importantly)
the tension of the organs of speech is reduced” (Matusevich 1976: 100). It is substantially
shorter than stressed /a/, with a mean duration given as 90 ms. to the 196 ms. of its
stressed counterpart. It is said to be perceptually “further back and more closed than a
stressed ‘a’, less tense and shorter”. Avanesov (1968) says pretonic /a, o/ is “not always
identical, but generally produced with a bit less lowering of the lower jaw, and therefore
not as wide opening of the mouth, as for a stressed [a]” (Avanesov 1968: 51). He
cautions, however, that it must nonetheless remain “a-like” in character, i.e. not raised all
the way to schwa.
What is clear from this is that the vowel in question is subject to some phonetic
reduction, a fact which, as in the case of Italian and Brazilian Portuguese, questions the
extent to which a clear distinction can be drawn between the reduction in question and
the reduction found in, e.g. Eastern Bulgarian.
There are further complicating factors in the realization of degree two reduction
as well. Firstly, in absolute word-initial position /a/ and /o/ are not in fact reduced to
schwa, but rather are realized as the same sort of [a] as is found in the first pretonic
syllable, which I will transcribe from here on as []. This is not unexpected, given the
correlation between reduction and duration we have seen in action elsewhere. Vowels in
onsetless initial syllables are seen in a variety of languages to be longer than their
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