Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

story of articulatory approximation followed by misperception and phonologization of the
merger is obviously entirely incorrect. A clear case of such a set of developments is
found in some northern Russian dialects where etymological /o/ under specific accentual
circumstances (See Timberlake 1983a. and 1993 for details) splits into /o/ and what is
traditionally symbolized /ô/ in the Slavic literature (and in which the contrast between /a/
and /o/ is realized in unstressed syllables). This, in combination with a subsequent merger
of */u/ with original /o/, produces a situation in which /ô/ (higher and often
diphthongized) contrasts with /o/ only under stress. This is so not because unstressed
syllables were not durationally strong enough to license the contrast (in these dialects
there is apparently little reduction of unstressed vowels to begin with - hence the
persistence of the /a/ - /o/ contrast), but because /ô/ arose only in syllables which bore
particular types of accent.
The resulting licensing asymmetry is clearly not “phonetically determined” in a
synchronic sense, though it is phonetically explicable as an instance of phonologization.
Indeed, Timberlake (1993) suggests a phonetic explanation for the split of original */o/ in
North Russian dialects involving the pitch curves and attendant durational patterns
produced by the earlier pitch accent system, rephonologized upon the breakdown of that
system in the relevant dialects. Approaching the typology of UVR systems from a
phonetically-motivated phonologization model, we can account equally well for the
107