Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

drastically decreased, as an already lowered amplitude continues to drop. The most
perceptible and least distorted (by non-modal phonation) part of the vowel, on the other
hand, is at the very beginning, during the lengthened CV transitions, long before the
vowel reaches its target articulation. This unfortunate phasing relationship between the
supralaryngeal target of the vowel and the point at which the laryngeal and aerodynamic
weakening of the final vowel is at its lowest could cause listeners to perceive the height
of the earlier part of the vowel as the intended target, with reinterpretation in this instance
leading to raising. For high vowels, by contrast, the same effect could lead to
centralization or laxing.
If this scenario took place in the final open syllables of Standard Malay as
described above, it could explain the raising these final vowels in particular undergo. If
this masking of the "strengthened" target articulation by phonetic weakness of another
sort is enough to lead to phonologization, the result could be similar to that described
above for Dutch: Once the percept of laxing or raising gave rise to the phonologization of
an actual target articulation of the final vowel that was laxed or raised, the durational
characteristics appropriate to the resulting vowel would be realized here as well, final
lengthening or not (just as described above for newly devoiced finals, or for the Dutch
schwa). In this new situation, phrase-final vowels might actually be shorter and more
reduced than their phrase-medial counterparts, though in the original situation, of course,
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