Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

insofar as we have seen how positional durational asymmetries can give rise to
neutralization patterns in other positions, such as stressed and unstressed syllables.
Languages in which final lengthening has been identified experimentally include
American Sign Language (Brentari 1995), Beijing Chinese (Zhang 2001), Brazilian
Portuguese (Major 1985, Simões 1991), Bulgarian (Savitska and Bojadzhiev 1988),
Creek (Johnson and Martin 2001), Czech (Dankovicˇová 1997), Dutch (Cambier-
Langeveld 1997, 1999), English (see above), French (Delattre 1966, Fletcher 1991),
German (Kohler 1983), Hausa (Newman and Van Heuven 1981), Israeli Hebrew
(Berkovits 1984, 1993a, 1993b, 1994,), Italian (Farnetani and Kori 1990), Japanese
(Ueyama 1999), Jicarilla Apache (Tuttle 2000), Jordanian Arabic (de Jong and Zawaydeh
1999), Korean (Cho 2000), Luganda (Zhang 2001), Russian (Zlatoustova 1981: 13-17),
Spanish (Delattre 1966), and Swedish (Nord 1974, 1986). It has been described or
implied in numerous descriptive grammars as well, as shall be seen below. It is difficult
to assess the universality of the phenomenon due to the tendency for experimental studies
to focus on European languages (and primarily English). Most grammar writers, to
compound the problem, for fairly obvious reasons make no reference,positive or
negative, to the phenomenon positive. Nonetheless, I know of no study experimental or
impressionistic making the explicit claim that a language lacks any form of final
lengthening. The existence of phrase-final lengthening in such pre- or non-linguistic
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