Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

phrase-final devoicing seems to be continued here: I was unable to locate any clear
instance of a language that glottalizes word-final vowels only when they are phrase-
internal, which is fairly unsurprising given the above. And as above, it is primarily
unstressed vowels that are subject to phrase-final glottalization. Again, however, there are
some crucial counterexamples.
Hyman quotes Timothy Vance writing that in Tokyo Japanese, which inserts
glottal stop after short vowels before pause, “...the glottal stop after a short vowel is more
salient when a speaker is excited and emphatic” (Hyman 1988: 114). From what we now
know of phrase-final glottalization, however, “excitement” or emphasis should if
anything prevent glottalization of the final short vowel. Likewise, recall from the
discussion of devoicing above Sapir’s report that in Southern Paiute the “rhetorical
emphasis” which rescues final vowels from devoicing actually results in their
lengthening, sometimes with the addition of a glottal stop. Finally, in the Isthmus
Veracruz Nahuat dialect of Nahuatl, a “junctural glottal stop” is inserted before phrase
boundaries (Wolgemuth 1969). This glottal stop after short vowels is distinguishable
from the phonemic glottal stop in being very brief and lacking complete closure. When
the final short vowel is stressed, however, this junctural glottal is “lengthened and
strengthened”, so that it comes close to being indistinguishable from its underlying
counterpart. Obviously, all of this is a problem for the above account of phrase-final
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