Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

that final lengthening does not significantly affect phrase-final devoiced vowels. It does
not mean that the language has no phrase-final lengthening, or that any lengthening it has
differs significantly in kind (rather than in domain of application) from that found in other
languages. Lowered subglottal pressure in this case has resulted in the phonologization of
phrase-final vowel devoicing, with concomitant (probably predictable) changes to the
segmental domain of final lengthening in the relevant phrases. It has not, by contrast,
resulted in the effacement (let alone reversal) of the phrase-final lengthening pattern as
such. This argument is important for analogous situations in the following two sections.
Final vowel devoicing can thus be phonologized directly as one of a variety of
patterns of final devoicing, aspiration, clipping or shortening of domain-final material. As
I will argue below, it can also contribute to phonologization in a more subtle way, by
contributing to the perceptual obscuring of vowel quality contrasts which would
otherwise be robust in a lengthened final syllable.
3.6.2. Glottalization
As seen above, along with the devoicing caused by the characteristic phrase-final
subglottal pressure drop (and the equally-characteristic and related phrase-final lowering
of F0), another common salient feature of final syllables crosslinguistically is
glottalization or laryngealization. I will use the term glottalization throughout (despite the
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