Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

languages fail to strengthen, and indeed even reduce phrase-final vowels, regardless of
whatever effect phrase-final lengthening may or may not have?", then the answer is
clearly yes, to the extent that reports are correct. We should be cautious, however, before
we take this to mean necessarily that this language has no final lengthening, or that final
lengthening in this language is non-strengthening, in light of the results of Cambier-
Langeveld's 1997 study of final lengthening in Dutch, where it was shown that when the
final vowel of a word was schwa (and hence potentially resistant to lengthening), final
lengthening simply took place over a larger domain extending back from the final
syllable. A careful study of a language reporting particularly great reduction of phrase-
final vowels could well discover the same pattern, that not only did the language have
final lengthening (just retracted from the reduced final vowel), but that it was even
strengthening the articulation of the material it applied to as well.
If the latter were true, however, we would legitimately wonder why the final
vowel was reducing in the first place, perhaps even to the point of reducing a five vowel
system to the three vowels common in the unstressed vocalism of the languages of the
world. The following is a potential answer to this question: It is clear from the discussion
of the phonetic properties of final syllables above that, whatever properties their
supralaryngeal articulations may take, other properties are contributing to a general lack
of perceptual robustness for material realized in this position. It was argued in the
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