Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

crosslinguistic voiced counterparts, the subglottal pressure drop “not only inhibits final
lengthening, it also appears to induce final shortening”.
Given the evidence of the numerous phonetic studies and phonological patterns
cited above, the claim that final unstressed vowels (and perhaps stressed as well) are
lengthened without any increase in gestural magnitude just cannot be accurate, at the very
least in a large number of cases. Though the phonetic studies deal only with a few
languages, were this claim true more generally, the Final Resistance patterns discussed
above would by all rights not exist. It is my contention here, however, that the two
phonetic trends, (final lengthening and a phrase-final drop in subglottal pressure) are not
in fact contradictory in synchronic phonetic implementation in any way 89 . . If the defining
characteristics of final lengthening are a reduction in gestural stiffness and an increase in
the magnitude of certain supralaryngeal gestures (e.g. Cho’s sonority enhancement), then
it is not clear what possible detriment to the integrity of this pattern’s implementation
could be caused by simultaneous low subglottal pressure (except over time through
reinterpretation). That the perceptual consequences of this cooccurrence could result in
diachronic implementational changes owing to the lowered perceptual salience of the
89 Where examples of implementationally contradictory phonetic properties would be something like the
relationship between nasalization and oral frication, or voicing and turbulent frication downstream, where
the realization of the former in each case actually obliterates the phonetic conditions necessary for the
implementation of the latter (i.e. a substantial pressure drop across the oral constriction) (Ohala and Ohala
1993).
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