Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

(1995) about metaphony in Spanish and Italian dialects: metaphony does not occur (high
vowels do not raise preceding vowels) from positions in which there is no contrast
between high and mid vowels 53 . If metaphony were not at least in part concerned with the
preservation of contrasts in the triggering syllable, such a generalization would go
unexplained. It also seems relevant in this regard that in the languages in question the
triggering vowels are generally the sole exponents of one or another morphological
category, meaning that neutralization of contrasts here would result in the loss of
grammatical information. Recall that in the case of the only vowel triggering laxing
harmony in Pasiego, neutralization of the tense-lax opposition would result in the
collapse of the mass vs. count opposition for masculine nouns as well 54 .
It is clear from the above that in systems such as Pasiego Spanish, the privileged
licensing of the features in question is not due to the phonetic characteristics of that
53 For this generalization to hold, of course, systems in which subsequent neutralizing reductions (of all
finals to schwa, of -o- to -u-, etc.) have introduced opacity into the metaphony pattern must be analyzed as
having a high-mid contrast at least underlyingly.
54 It is possible too that in some ways Ohala’s view and Walker’s are not so mutually exclusive as they
otherwise seem. In the Ohalian scenario, for example, the original coarticulatory effect is generally taken as
a given. It is something properly “unintended”, which the listener for whatever reason erroneously parses as
“intentional”. While Ohala is clearly referring to the realm of the phonemic here, it is by now well known
that coarticulation strategies are both planned and language-specific (which is to say, as “intentional” as
anything else in phonology). It is also commonly accepted that segments may be cued by features which
are not temporally coextensive with them (one thinks of vowel duration as a cue for the voicing distinction
in following obstruents in English). It is perhaps not far-fetched to imagine that cues for a positionallychallenged
contrast might become phonetically maximized, such that the coarticulatory effect involved in
the hypocorrection is in fact particularly robust in those very instances in which the hypocorrections take
place. The input to the change would thus be inherently skewed toward the occurrence of that same,
perhaps suggesting as well a way of understanding why the change takes place despite the retention of the
conditioning environment. All this is fertile ground for future experimental investigation.
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