Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

preceding consonants, etc.). It seems unlikely, however, that a vowel would leave of all
things glottal constriction on a preceding consonant unless it were itself glottalized. We
might hypothesize then that the direct ancestor to the Gonja forms above was one with a
short, low amplitude, creaky-voiced final vowel, whose laryngealization may either have
affected the sonorant itself in implementation, or at least have obscured the already
lower-salience acoustic modulation of the transition from the sonorant to the short
vowel 93 , such that the sequence could be reinterpreted as merely a laryngealized
sonorant 94 . This would mean Hyman is correct to see this correspondence as the product
of reduction of a final segment, with the sole caveat that the pre-deletion phonetic
realization of the final segment in question was quite probably the result of the
phonologization of prepausal creakiness. This may seem a pedantic distinction, but it is
an important one as well if the question we are posing is an etiological one 95 .
Before looking more closely at the crosslinguistic typology of final glottalization,
it is necessary to address the phonetic issues surrounding the development of creaky
voice in phrase-final syllables. Most sources treating creaky phonation characterize its
production and acoustic and aerodynamic consequences similarly: Gordon and
93
As compared with, e.g., that of the transition from obstruent to vowel.
94
The additional duration supplied by the misparsed final vowel could actually help in this regard, making
a (probably shorter) onset sonorant sound more like a (probably longer) coda sonorant.
95
In treating these facts, of course, one might wonder about the role of the ATR specification of the lost
vowel in this connection. The cognate dialect forms retaining the vowel, however, show both vowel series
yielding the same result upon deletion.
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