Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

generally between 95 and 125 in the same environments. What seem to be disallowed in
final syllables crosslinguistically, then, are these over-short vowels. In systems where
short vowels too are peripheral and long vowels are described as more or less twice the
length of short vowels (canonical monomoraic-bimoraic oppositions, as in the Dravidian
languages noted above), by contrast, the long/short opposition seems generally (though
perhaps not exclusively) to be neutralized in favor of the short vowel.
3.8. Summary
In this chapter I have presented a survey of the phonetic and phonological patterns
common to domain-final syllables and, where possible, I have explicated the relationship
between the former and the latter. Final syllables were shown frequently to host patterns
both of phonological strength and phonological weakness. Strength effects in final
position were of a sharply limited character; final syllables rarely if ever function as the
sole center of prominence in the word domain in the way that, say, stressed syllables,
frequently do. When they are strong at all, this strength is generally manifested as a
pattern of Final Resistance to some other reduction or assimilation process (such as
UVR) which would otherwise have targeted a syllable of the prosodic status in question.
This difference between final strength and UVR was attributed to differences in the
consistency and magnitude at the word level of the durational asymmetries giving rise to
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