Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

asymmetry plays a role as well. In the final lengthening case, while the duration of the
domain-final syllable increases in some cases quite significantly, this does not mean that
the domain-internal syllables in the word are made in any way durationally deficient. On
the contrary, they are as long (or short) as they would be in any other token of the same
word at the same rate of speech, such that their non-final status alone does not cause them
to be realized with a duration which would in any way compromise them articulatorily or
perceptually. There is even evidence from a number of studies (e.g. Berkovits 1993,
Cambier-Langeveld 1999) that phrase-final lengthening often increases to some extent at
least the durations of segments in the word prior to the final syllables as well, though
such lengthening decreases in magnitude as distance from the boundary increases.
Nonetheless, this failure of the process to single out the final syllable as the unique locus
of additional durational prominence would serve to decrease the likelihood that the
effects of such an asymmetry would ultimately become categorical through
phonologization.
The asymmetry in the stressed/unstressed case, on the other hand, is quite
different. In most systems of phonological vowel reduction, it is not merely that the
stressed syllable is longer than the unstressed syllables, but rather that the unstressed
syllables (or some subset thereof) are actually durationally contracted, or realized with
durations sufficiently short regardless to cause articulatory undershoot (see Chapter 2 -
169