Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

intended pronunciation, constructs a new representation for the form in question: / v/. In
the metaphony case, then, a sequence /éCi#/ would perhaps include some raising of the
tonic mid vowel as a result of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. A correct interpretation of
the speaker’s intentions would attribute the raising effect to the following high vowel and
parse the tonic vowel as mid regardless. The final high vowel, however, occurs in a
position in which accurate perception is impeded by the phonetic weakening effects
discussed above. It is possible, then, that a listener could misperceive the /éCi/ sequence
such that he or she failed to attribute the coarticulatory raising to a following high vowel,
reconstructing the speaker’s intended production instead to be an actual stressed high
vowel in the penultimate syllable 52 .
Another, synchronically-oriented approach to weak-to-strong harmony patterns is
that of Walker (2001). In treating, inter alia, the metaphony patterns found in Italian
52 This scenario is not without complications. It is most convincing, to my mind, in instances where the
conditioning environment for the change is actually lost, a result of the perceptual failure preventing correct
attribution of the coarticulatory effect. In the metaphony case (and others), however, the conditioning
environment is not lost. Ohala (1993: 246-247) suggests that in such cases the listener might perceive both
segments accurately, but lack the experience to attribute the coarticulatory effect to its actual source (e.g.,
the listener is a child, still acquiring the phonological patterns of the language). One problem here is that it
makes clear predictions about differences between child-initiated and adult-initiated sound changes, which,
to the extent that these are distinguishable, are wanting in empirical substantiation. Another problem is that
the acquisition-based explanation makes irrelevant the fact that the trigger for such changes is in a
perceptually-non-optimal environment (or is actually weakened itself articulatorily), but surely this is not
accidental. The seeds of a resolution to this problem may lie in another aspect of this type of change. In
Ohala’s conception, the listener’s new UR for a given item will often give rise to lexical doublets
(assuming the listener does at least occasionally parse this item correctly). It is possible to imagine in such
instances a process of leveling across competing representations leading to forms containing both the
misparsed target and the original trigger of the change. One is reminded in this connection of the exemplarbased
models of the lexicon defended in, e.g., Pierrehumbert 2001). These problems await resolution.
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