Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

syllables are apparently required to be too short to contain long vowels, short vowels in
stressed syllables are not lengthened so much as to endanger the long/short contrast.
In final syllables, the situation is different. That these are never the sole position
in which a quantity contrast occurs falls out from the fact that, while unstressed syllables
may be durationally compromised or restricted relative to stressed syllables in some
systems, it is never that case that along with final lengthening the durations of non-final
syllables are actually curtailed or limited. This difference must be due to the lexical
nature of the stressed/unstressed contrast, as opposed to the largely phrase-level operation
of the final lengthening process.
But why, when final lengthening does cause neutralization of long/short contrasts,
is the resulting vowel so often phonologized as short or "half-long", as some descriptions
put it? Buckley's answer is that short is the "unmarked" member of the opposition, to
which we therefore default. But this seems rather unsatisfying as explanations go. By
now we clearly recognize that "markedness" of features or segment types is often not
absolute, but is rather comprehensible only relative to the environments within which the
features in question are being realized (Steriade 1994, 2001). In stressed syllables,
obviously, the perceptual confusion caused by lengthening short vowels does not result in
default to the "unmarked" short member of the opposition 114 , Of course, it should not,
114
Speaking, of course, of phonetic lengthening of short vowels in stressed syllables in a system prior to the
phonologization of any constraint requiring that stressed vowels or syllables be bimoraic.
267