Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

increased amount of phonetic duration characteristically realized in the relevant position.
Another example, that of Timugon Murut, illustrates a similar danger in the assumption,
even when duration is involved in determining licensing capacity in a system, that the
relationship between these two is a simple direct proportion.
As outlined in 3.2.3-n. above, Timugon Murut, an Austronesian language of
Sabah in Borneo (Prentice 1971, Kroeger 1992), has four contrastive vowel qualities: /i,
a, o, u/. These all only contrast, however, in the (fixed penultimate) stressed syllable and
the posttonic final. Steriade notes of Murut, however, that “the contrast of rounding
among non-high vowels occurs also - in a more limited fashion - in the stressed syllable,
which occurs in penult position. Thus final [o] contrasts with [a] in words of any shape,
whereas penult o contrasts with a only in words in which the final is an o (Steriade 1994:
13). This is illustrated in (21)
(21) Distribution of non-high vowels in Timugon Murut
a. tanom ‘plant’
baloy ‘house’
limo ‘dew’
ilo ‘look!’
b. bolos ‘voice’ *bolas
onto ‘smell of burnt rice’ *onta
lopot ‘wrap up’ *lopat
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