Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

when following voiced consonants or phonemic glottal stop, while following voiceless
consonants they are “extremely brief and more or less devoiced”, especially after
sibilants, where they are all but inaudible. Varying laryngeal settings can even be
distributed according to sociolinguistic criteria, as in the famous case of Koasati
(Muskogean, Kimball 1991), in which in the speech of men, final vowels are all
“prolonged”, while in the speech of women a final glottal stop is inserted after the vowel
(with laxing of final high vowels) 100 .
Often the distribution of devoicing and glottalization serves to distinguish final
long vowels from final short vowels (a contrast which, as described below, is otherwise
prone to collapse in final position). Hyman notes that in most languages with final glottal
stop insertion, the process only applies after a short vowel (assuming a contrast, though in
collapsed systems the quantity-neutralized glottalized vowel is generally short
phonetically as well). The long vowel in these systems usually remains untouched, as in
Hausa, where according to Carnochan it “just dies away” (Carnochan 1988) 101 , or in
Luiseño (Hyde 1991), where short stressed vowels have a “clipped” quality, where longs
and unstressed vowels do not 102 . I have not found any system in which the short vowel is
glottalized and the long vowel partially (but significantly) devoiced. Such a system could
100
Men will also choose glottal stop insertion from time to time, apparently when they wish to be “precise”.
101
A small set of long-vowel-final words in Hausa is also realized with final glottal stop, though they do
not neutralize durationally with the short vowels (Newman and Van Heuven 1981).
102
It seems likely that the unstressed shorts must have or have had some allophonic glottalization as well,
just not even to sound “clipped”, as would, e.g. a phonologically inserted glottal stop.
225