Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

they were not. The nature of final lengthening and the potential gestural strengthening of
the affected segments, however, would not necessarily have changed. As demonstrated
for Dutch, if the vowel in phrase-final position is inherently short to the point of resisting
lengthening, lengthening might simply be felt further back in the word as its unaltered
domain span came to include more of the word due to the shortness of the final segment.
It is possible, then, that reduction patterns targeting specifically phrase-final
syllables are actually the result of a phonologization caused by the perceptual weakness
of those syllables, and not necessarily by any original weakening of supralaryngeal
gestures in that position. If the perceptual weakening story is true, then, as with
devoicing, in the pre-phonologization state of the system, there is no problem with
assuming final lengthening to have applied to unstressed final syllables with articulatory
strengthening, just as it has been shown to do in numerous examples laid out in section
3.2.3. Obviously only experimental evidence can ultimately resolve this question.
This idea of final reduction patterns originating in the phonologization of the
perceptual weakness of the final syllable, rather than in decreased magnitude of
supralaryngeal gestures, may account for another trend found in final syllables in some
languages: monophthongization. In most dialects of Seediq, for example, word-final
diphthongs /aw/ and /aj/ become /e/ and /o/ (Holmer 1996: 25) 112 . If under final
112 Which are both realized as [u] when word-final today due to the vowel reduction described in Chapter 2.
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