Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

nasal consonant, and the vowel remains nasal. Several other suffixes have already come
to restore the nasal only optionally. In Bare (Northern Arawak, Aikhenvald 1996),
nasalization again only occurs on final vowels. Nasalized vowels are underlying in only
two forms of Aikhenvald’s corpus, while all the others are derived from the truncation of
forms ending in any of several suffixes of the general shape /-nV/. The deletion leads to
nasalization of the word-final vowel. Interestingly, this truncation takes place only non-
prepausally, where before pause, in another instance of domain-final resistance to
deletion, the suffix remains intact. In these examples, nothing about the phonetics of final
position is “licensing” the appearance of a contrast between nasal and oral vowels. The
phonetic characteristics (here, detrimental) have clearly caused the emergence of the
contrast, but can hardly be imagined to facilitate in any active way in the present. The
contrast exists here, then, only because it came to exist here, and because it has so far
avoided being effaced by the perceptual weakness of the position.
3.6.5. Final vowel reduction and loss of contrasts
3.6.5.1. Lowering
I turn back now to the question which began this section on final weakness, the
question as to whether domain-final positions are in some cases singled out as positions
of particularly evident phonetic weakening, eventually yielding loss of vowel contrasts.
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