Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

targeted, and hence realized as glottalization proper, with the tightly adducted vocal folds
we would expect of it. At this point, a rise in subglottal pressure such as that associated
with stress or emphasis would come to increase the perceptual robustness of the
creakiness (and glottal occlusion if there is one), yielding the patterns described above. It
is important to bear in mind at this point that, as before, “phonologized” does not
necessarily mean “phonemicized”. The emphatic glottal stop in Tokyo Japanese, for
example is “non-distinctive” according to Vance. This seems to be the case quite
frequently here 97 . If the resulting configuration is non-contrastive, and it plays no obvious
role in other aspects of the lexical or categorical phonology, there is no reason to assume
the workings here of anything other than the phonetics, as outlined in Chapter 1. Which is
to say, this glottalization, despite being independently targeted, may nonetheless have no
direct representation in the phonology beyond the cooccurrence of a word-final vowel
and a phrase-boundary.
This fairly innocuous conclusion, however, has certain peculiar consequences for
some models of the phonetic component. We have been assuming, with Keating (1996),
that the phonetic component must be capable of representation varying degrees of
specification of a given feature. A narrow specification (or target window), often
misleadingly called “categorical” implementation, allows little contextual variation, while
97 And almost exclusively in the case of devoicing.
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