Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

While the non-finality of stress approach can account for some of the problems
found crosslinguistically with vowel length in final syllables, it cannot account for them
all, and while it seems clear that independently of these phenomena there is a
demonstrable crosslinguistic pattern of avoiding the parsing of final syllables for metrical
purposes, this is not the whole story here. First, non-finality refers to a tendency to avoid
stressing vowels in final syllables of any kind, open or closed. As Buckley 1998 argues,
there is a set of phenomena connected specifically to the vowels of final open syllables,
not all of which non-finality approaches can address.
In addition to the failure of Iambic Lengthening, Buckley draws attention to other
cases in which lengthening processes fail to apply to word-final vowels. One of his
examples is Italian, in which the vowels in stressed open syllables lengthen (closed
syllables being already bimoraic), unless stress is final. Thus we have (38a), but also
(38b):
(38) Italian stress and vowel length
a. eco [ko] 'echo'
papa [pá:pa] 'pope'
capitano [kapitá:no] 'captain'
capitano [ká:pitano] 'they arrive'
povero [pvero] 'poor'
b. papà [papá] 'father'
così [kozí] 'thus'
caffè [kaffé] 'coffee'
resterà [resterá) 'will stay'
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