Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

since stressed syllables are a lengthening context, in which short vowels may sound long,
but nothing about long vowels is likely to sound short. For a listener to simply decide,
then, that the phonetically manifestly long stressed vowels were in fact intended to be
short because this option is "unmarked' is incomprehensible. But final position is also a
lengthening context, and, absent any other conditioning factors, such a decision on the
part of the listener seems no less unwarranted. There, must, therefore, be something else
at work here.
Again, while lexically stressed syllables will express their additional duration in
all tokens of the string in question, final syllables will generally acquire significant length
only prepausally, where they are also characteristically weakened in some respects as
well. This weakening, primarily the result of a sharp drop in subglottal pressure in
phrase-final position, is not a characteristic of stressed syllables, and may help account
for differences in the quantity neutralization patterns found in the two positions. The
logic is this: in stressed syllables, phonetic realizations of both long and short vowels
prior to neutralization may come to be, let us say for the sake of argument, in the
neighborhood of 200 ms and with steady amplitude throughout. Their similarity in this
respect would obscure the contrasts between long and short and cause neutralization in
favor of the longs. In final syllables, by contrast, both long and short vowels might come
to be 200 ms or so in duration, but with a significant amplitude drop, possibly together
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