Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Mentioned already were reports of an especially large amount of reduction of phrase-final
vowels in Andalusian dialects (Sanders 1994, 118). In Kawaiisu (Zigmond, Booth and
Munro, 1990: 13), word-final short vowels are often dropped, especially when they are
utterance-final. Patterns like these are obviously inconsistent with a view of final open
syllables as environments for vowel lengthening and strengthening such as that suggested
by the articulatory studies and description of Final Strength detailed above. Before
addressing possible explanations for these patterns, I present a short catalogue of
reduction processes, neutralizing and non-neutralizing, targeting final vowels in
particular. The balance of examples in the literature is heavily skewed toward processes
affecting both phrase-medial word-final vowels and phrase-final vowels alike. Though
this may indeed be a valid generalization about crosslinguistic patterning of these effects,
quirks of the descriptive literature could play some role in creating the appearance of this
distribution: there is a strong tendency toward underdescription of effects which are
restricted to phrase-final position, which could be the fault of both oversight, conscious
restriction to lexical processes, or the reporting of largely phrase-final effects as
"sporadic" or "optional" word-final processes instead. Caution is therefore in order here.
Instances of word-final devoicing leading to deletion were treated above in the
section on devoicing, and in any case word-final vowel deletion is so common an effect
crosslinguistically as to need no exemplification here beyond those examples already
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