Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

are responsible for the phonological ambiguity of final syllables with respect to patterns
of positional neutralization. Because final syllables have received little attention in the
context of PN in previous literature, and because even the phonetic literature is rather
one-dimensional, focused primarily on phrase-final lengthening, the following sections
have as an ancillary purpose the documentation in as much detail as possible of the
crosslinguistic range of these patterns. Each section will therefore be quite extensive.
3.6.1. Devoicing
The first such effect to be discussed, touched upon already above with reference
to Hock’s Weakening theory, is the tendency to phrase-final voicelessness. The
significance of this effect for consonants is commonly known, so I shall limit the
discussion here to the consequences of this effect for the realization of vowels. Domain-
final devoicing of vowels is extremely common crosslinguistically. It ranges from the
radically low-level, sporadic effect rarely even mentioned in descriptions of languages
where one finds it such as, for example, Russian, to the heavily morphologized devoicing
patterns in the “utterance final” forms of Oneida analyzed by Michelson (1999). It often
figures in descriptions as the addition of aspiration, or the epenthesis of final /h/ (as in
Sapir and Hoijer’s 1967 description of Navaho). It is also a common phonetic source of
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