Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

tendency for domain-initial segments to be strengthened both in duration and magnitude
of gestures. See chapter 4 for discussion of this effect.
Unsurprisingly in light of the reduction data, vowels in absolute initial position in
Russian are durationally enhanced as well. Phonetically, then, there is plenty of
crosslinguistic evidence for the durational enhancement of absolute word-initial vowels,
and the failure of these to reduce to schwa in Russian makes perfect sense if reduction to
schwa is a function of vowel duration 27 . Crosswhite, for whom reduction to schwa in
Russian represents the inability of non-first-pretonic vowels to bear moras, derives this
non-reduction with a constraint mandating the alignment of a mora to the word-edge.
Reduction to schwa also fails to apply in situations of hiatus before [a]. Thus, we
find [saatnaenije] (*[satnaenije]), ‘relationship’. This too makes sense under the
assumption that reduction to schwa in Russian is not carried out in the categorical
phonology at all, but rather is an instance of gradient, duration-dependent phonetic
raising, just like the less dramatic effect described above in, e.g., Italian. If the problem
with producing [a] in an unstressed syllable with consonants on either side is lack of
sufficient time for the jaw-lowering gesture to reach target, the realization of two
identical vowels with no intervening consonant would solve this problem handily, giving
27
Crosswhite, for whom reduction to schwa in Russian represents the inability of non-first-pretonic vowels
to bear moras, derives this non-reduction with a constraint mandating the alignment of a mora to the wordedge.
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