Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

is 121 ms long (measured conservatively). The stressed vowel has a duration of 119 ms
and the pretonic 106 ms. The (relatively late-occurring) F1 maximum for the final vowel
is 568 Hz, with an F2 of 1239 Hz. A short study of formant values for unstressed /a/ in 63
open first pretonic syllables (in non-nasal contexts followed by voiced or voiceless
obstruents) from the speaker producing the spectrogram above (a Leningrad native)
yielded a mean F1 of 555 Hz and a mean F2 of 1216 Hz, placing the values for the final
vowel of this token well within the speakers range for Degree 1 reduction (see Chapter
2). The unreduced stressed /a/ in this token, as expected, has a higher F1: 608 Hz, with an
F2 of 1308 (a bit high, probably due to the surrounding coronals). The final is then
clearly resistant to reduction in the sense outlined above. It also has a low amplitude,
dropping off drastically toward the end. The irregular wide spacing of the glottal pulses
together with the variations in their amplitudes indicates (audible) creaky phonation 92 ,
and the very final portion of the vowel appears to devoice slightly before the pause. All
this suggests the low subglottal pressure we expect to find in phrase-final syllables (see
below for the less-than-obvious reason this should be the case for creaky voice).
As noted, the coexistence of low subglottal pressure (with concomitant devoicing)
and final lengthening (with concomitant supralaryngeal gestural strengthening), while not
91 This spectrogram and all the attendant analysis was made using the Praat 4.0.2 speech analysis software
(Copyright@1992-2001 by Paul Boersma and David Weenink). Formant measures were taken using LPC
autocorrelation analysis.
92 Itself actually potentially contributing some raising of F1 in this example (Gordon and Ladefoged 2001).
206