Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

their common properties, restoring the original relationship between specified and
underspecified as different instantiations of a single feature type. In a strictly articulatory
model of the phonetic component (such as that advocated by many practitioners of
Articulatory Phonology (Browman and Goldstein, passim), however, the problem is more
serious. Here the relationship between the specified and the underspecified breaks down,
as there is no point or window along a continuum of possible instantiations of “lowered
subglottal pressure, vocal fold slackening, and vocal fold abduction” which corresponds
to the narrow target “vocal fold tension and tight adduction” (in the same sense that a
command to lower the jaw is not a point along a continuum of possible jaw-raising
gestures, despite the fact that the same organ is involved). In this model, then, the
phonologizations of devoicing and glottalization described above cannot be characterized
as instances of a shift from phonetic underspecification to phonetic specification in the
way I have been proposing. Instead, they must be seen as instances of another type of
process altogether, one utterly distinct in kind from, e.g. the phonologization of
consonant-induced F0 perturbations on following vowels discussed by Hyman. This
result commits us, however, to a serious mischaracterization of these processes, and in so
doing deprives us of significant insight into both the nature and working of
phonologization, and the typology of final-position effects as well 98 .
98
The most illustrative system in this regard would be one in which glottalization had been phonologized
(as, say, insertion of contrastive glottal stop) either utterance or Intonational Phrase-finally, while before
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