Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Paiute a type of “rhetorical emphasis” sometimes placed on words which allows final
vowels to avoid devoicing, to be realized instead “lengthened and generally followed by
glottal stop” (see below for discussion of domain-final glottalization).
This does not mean that stressed vowels cannot be realized with devoicing.
Gordon mentions one such language, Papago. To this we may add as an example Goajiro
(Arawakan) as described by Mansen 1967, in which unstressed final short vowels are
devoiced completely, but stressed final short vowels are lengthened and only partially
devoiced (as in the clipping patterns mentioned above). At least one case, however,
stands out as potentially problematic: In Afar, as described by Bliese (1976), utterance-
final stressed open syllables are realized with “final aspiration”, while utterance-
internally they are not:
(28) Utterance-final stressed vowel devoicing in Afar (Bliese 1976)
/aba na-h/ 'they do' cf. internal /aba na/
/li yo-h/ 'I have'
Bliese does not mention here the fate of utterance-final unstressed vowels (though he
does note some optional preboundary glottalization, Bliese 1976: 164), which allows
several interpretations: if this is not an oversight, it is conceivable that final unstressed
vowels are never in fact devoiced at all, which would be difficult to explain from the
point of view of the generalizations and phonetic explanations detailed above.
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