Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

should not, and those predictions are largely correct. That UVR patterns should center
overwhelmingly on neutralizations of vowel height contrasts, with few if any instances of
systems based on the neutralization of front/back, round or ATR contrasts in unstressed
syllables is predicted in the phonologization model, which identifies as the primary
source of UVR patterns durational pressures on the articulatory implementation of height
contrasts. No such pressure, on the other hand, is known to exist on front/back, rounding,
or ATR contrasts, meaning that UVR involving these should be less likely to arise. That a
contrast of vowel nasalization should be neutralized outside stressed syllables, as it is in
Copala Trique, for example, is also predictable, since it is well-known that in many
languages (as noted above for Brazilian Portuguese, where maintaining the contrast
nonetheless seems more important to the categorical phonology than reducing the
durations of all unstressed syllables) nasalized vowels are significantly longer than their
oral counterparts. Other theories of vowel reduction, such as that advanced in Crosswhite
(2001) fail to predict these typological regularities, in fact even predicting the reverse in
the case of contrast-enhancing UVR. The phonologization model, by contrast, both
accounts for typology of UVR systems, and in doing so creates the possibility for a much
simpler treatment of UVR in the phonology, since the latter is no longer compelled to
duplicate the work of phonologization in generating the phonetic naturalness of
typological patterns.
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