Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

increasing, and thus that the vocal folds are in fact being gradually abducted during the
production of this vowel. She concludes that the irregular phonation in question cannot
possibly be glottalization (as described above), but rather that the irregular glottal pulsing
arises from a combination of falling subglottal pressure, vocal fold slackening and vocal
fold abduction. She continues to suggest that glottalization in the environment of low
tone has the same origin, resulting from the reduction in subglottal pressure and vocal
fold slackening necessary to produce the desired pitch level.
This explanation is in perfect accord with the observed facts of phrase-final
allophonic glottalization (a term I will continue to employ despite its demonstrated
inaccuracy) in Russian. It is likewise immediately clear how the smooth transition from
creak to breathiness and voicelessness can occur in the course of the final vowel
discussed above. Both final devoicing and final glottalization thus have essentially the
same phonetic source (subglottal pressure drop and gradual laryngeal-gesture “fade” to
use the term suggested inaccurately above for all final gestures). They can also both be
characterized as resulting from phrase-final phonetic weakening and prominence-
reduction, though of course, in their phonologized states, there may be nothing weak
about them, from an articulatory point of view.
The crosslinguistic patterning of final glottalization is parallel to that described
above for final devoicing. Gordon’s generalization that word-final devoicing implies
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