Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

acoustic result of the overlay of these patterns within a system, however, may indeed
produce instability, resulting in phonologization patterns which ultimately efface the one
set of patterns or the other (at least to the extent that in a system in which phrase-final
devoicing has led to final vowel deletion, or final clipping, there is an obvious sense in
which the effect of the devoicing pattern has in the end won out over the final
lengthening pattern). I have also shown, however, that this in no way necessarily means
that in the resulting synchronic system there is no process of final lengthening or
strengthening. Rather, synchronic final lengthening could simply be active over a wider
span of segments than was the case in the ancestral system.
3.6.4. Nasalization
Before returning to the question posed at the beginning of this section on final
weakness, that of how to reconcile evidence for supralaryngeal strengthening in final
position with the idea of “final fade” and descriptions of “reduced” phrase-final vowels, it
is necessary to outline one additional phonetic tendency associated with final position
crosslinguistically: vowel nasalization. This tendency is not as well-known as those
discussed above, and, due to the subtlety of the effect in some cases, I suspect
underreported as well. One recent treatment of final nasalization is that of Hock, in his
1999 paper, mentioned above as advancing the hypothesis that final position is a
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