Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

contexts, however, h-epenthesis is obligatory. All this suggests a process now reasonably
distant from its original phonetic roots, subject to, among other things, morphological
conditioning.
Before moving on, it is necessary to address a final observation made by Gordon.
Gordon notes that the lowered subglottal pressure that causes final devoicing is “in direct
competition with another common crosslinguistic property of final position: final
lengthening” (p. 101). This is clearly true with respect to the potential phonologization
patterns that might result from these phonetic properties, insofar as completely devoiced
final vowels are unlikely candidates for the phonologization of final resistance to
qualitative vowel reduction, and vice versa. But there is another sense in which the claim
is problematic. Gordon notes (correctly) that despite the evidence that the increased
duration associated with final long vowels or final stressed vowels impedes final
devoicing, duration contributed by final lengthening generally does not rescue final
vowels from devoicing (though the existence of cases such as Dasenech above probably
count as exceptions to this otherwise valid generalization). Gordon attributes this pattern
to the fact that final lengthening, as opposed to stressed vowel lengthening, does not
involve any increase in the magnitude of associated gestures, but rather is just a
consequence of local gestural slowing (citing Beckman et al. 1992). If anything, in fact,
Gordon notes that since devoiced vowels are actually typically shorter than their
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