Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

To this we can add facts from neighboring Tudanca Spanish (Hualde 1989,
Flemming 1993, Dyck 1995). In Tudanca Spanish word-final high vowels are
phonetically laxed 49 . This laxness spreads left to the stressed vowel, laxing any
intervening vowels as well in the process. Additionally, in word-final unstressed syllables
the contrast between underlying /i/ and /e/ is neutralized, both vowels being realized as
lax [i] or [] 50 . Again, this neutralization suggests a position susceptible to vowel
reduction, i.e. actually a rather poor place to perceive fine contrasts in vowel quality. A
third piece of evidence comes from Sanders (1994), who presents an extensive study of a
similar (but unrelated) laxing harmony in the dialects of Eastern Andalusia. Sanders
provides data from an experimental study of the phonetics of vowels in this dialect,
showing that word-final (phrase-internal) vowels in this dialect (both tense and lax) are
shorter than the vowels of stressed syllables, but longer than the vowels of pretonic
unstressed syllables. For example, mean duration from three speakers for tonic tense /a/
was 86.98 ms, for word-initial tense /a/ 60.28 ms, and for word-final tense /a/ 76.85 ms.
Values for lax /A/ (not Sanders’s notation) were 90.18 ms, 58.24 ms, and 73.50 ms
respectively. Ratios for other vowels were similar (Sanders 1994: 168). Sanders had
hypothesized that his lax vowels might be phonetically longer than his tense vowels. The
49 There is no phonemic contrast between tense and lax vowels in Tudanca.
50 This neutralization does create surface contrasts between laxed vowels preceding underlying [i] and tense
vowels preceding underlying [e], as in the pair /abri/ [Ábr] ‘open’ and /abre/ [Ábr] (Flemming 1993: 11).
135