Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

I will depart from this aspect of Hyman’s analysis, however, in one respect:
Hyman claims that though final allophonic creak is surely the ultimate diachronic source
of final glottal stop insertion in many cases, this may not be historically true of all cases.
While contradicting this claim outright would be rash, I would nonetheless cast doubt on
the case for a second source proposed by Hyman to account for comparative evidence
from Akan dialects and from the Guang subgroup of Volta-Comoe. The pattern is as
follows. For certain cognate forms, one language or set of languages shows a vowel-final
disyllable, while another language or set of languages shows a monosyllable ending in a
glottalized sonorant. Thus, in data from Snider (1986):
(30) Final vowel loss in Guang
Gonja Chumburung
ka-wl wr ‘skin’
k-fl k-furi ‘moon’
e-in -ar ‘man’
Hyman suggests then that rather than having the “phonologization of pause” found in
some languages, in this instance we are dealing with the reduction of a final segment,
with glottalization of the consonant representing a trace of the lost final vowel. It is
certainly common enough that the loss of a final vowel leaves traces on preceding
segments (umlauts of various sorts on vowels, distinctive palatalization or affrication of
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