Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

(17) Hausa medial short vowels
a. [zobe] ‘ring’ b. [zbba] ‘rings’
[ree] ‘branch’ [rssa] ‘branches’
[tona] ‘dig up’ [tntona] ‘dig up, pluract.’
[sabo] ‘new’ [sabn soda] ‘new soldier’
The merger of the non-high medial short vowels as schwa thus seems to be a better
candidate for description as a categorical neutralization process 46 . Both merger patterns
clearly have as their ultimate source the durational asymmetry between short vowels in
phrase-final and non-phrase-final position. As with the mixed vowel reduction systems
discussed in Chapter 2, however, in the gradient cases (medial short high vowels and
potentially phrase-medial word-final short non-high vowels as well), the likelihood or
degree of phonetic overlap will be determined by the interaction of the duration of the
vowel with the coarticulatory influence of surrounding segments, while in the categorical
case merger will occur or fail to occur based solely on the position of the vowel within
the word or phrase, actual durational characteristics of any particular instantiation of the
vowel in that position notwithstanding.
46 Newman notes additional details: recent foreign loans with short /e/ and /o/ in closed syllables (such as
[fnsir] ‘pencil’ and [bs] ‘boss’) constitute lexical exceptions to this process, tending not to merge them
with /a/. Also while the word-internal closed-syllable merger is categorical, often even reflected in
orthography, non-prepausal word-final short /e/ and /o/ are said only in fast speech to have a tendency to
centralize. This suggests that the word-final version of the merger is actually gradient, another instance
such as those of Uyghur and Nawuri discussed below in which a word-internal categorical change operates
gradiently in word-final position.
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