Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

lengthening of vowels in first pretonic syllables is a property of certain Slavic languages
in particular 35 .
Language-specific apportionment of duration by the phonetics is nothing
controversial, however. In Russian, as in other languages, we already need to have a
phonetics capable of assigning radically different durations (at least for speakers such as
this one, and those described by Matusevich above) to equally moraic vowels stressed
and unstressed (first pretonic). We also need it to assign different durations to
monomoraic phrase-final vowels than it does to monomoraic phrase-internal word-final
vowels. We need it to alter durations of monomoraic vowels according to the complexity
or presence of onsets and codas in their syllables, to lengthen and shorten monomoraic
vowels according to the voicing specifications (and often other sonority-scale differences
as well - nasal, liquid, glide) of following consonants, according to the aspiration of
preceding consonants, to the number of syllables in the word, to the position of the word
in the utterance, to the position within the word of the monomoraic vowel regardless of
placement of stress, etc., etc. It is difficult in light of this to see what should prevent the
phonetics from assigning different durations to phonologically identical vowels as a
function of their position relative to the stressed syllable, as is the case in East Slavic.
35 A trace of an earlier prosodic system with bimoraic pitch accents
105