Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

mentioned. Often deletion is preceded, however, by reduction of contrasts (perhaps with
devoicing as well?). Several potential instances of this are discussed in Blevins and
Garrett (1998), in the context of metaphony-like quality transfers from reducing and
deleting finals to strong pretonics in Austronesian languages. Exemplary in this regard is
the development of final vowels in Nyungar (Pama-Nyungan, Blevins and Garrett 1998:
538-539). In the southwestern dialects of Nyungar, all final vowels are neutralized to
schwa (with metaphonic transfer of some features to preceding stressed vowels). In the
southern dialects of the language, this process has been taken a step further, with final
schwa disappearing altogether. Other examples of final vowel reduction follow:
(35) Final-only unstressed vowel reduction
a. Highland East Cushitic (Hudson 1976: 250) - In several East Cushitic languages and
dialects, particularly Burji, Hadiyya and Kambata, word-final /i/ and /a/ are subject to
laxing and devoicing, apparently leading often to deletion, more often in some dialects
than in others. Hudson notes that this is particularly the case when the final vowel follows
a "strong" syllable, where the final becomes "almost inaudible" 109 .
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Indeed, Blevins and Garrett (1998: 527-528) also note a link between final vowel loss (with
"compensatory metathesis") and strong penultimate stress, implicating in particular "the existence of tonic
length in peripheral binary feet, where the peripheral vowel is unstressed". This is particularly interesting in
light of the fairly common attestation discussed above of what is essentially the opposite pattern: the
tendency in languages with fixed penultimate stress for the vowel of the weak syllable in the final foot to
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