Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

in the relatively small set of cases remaining when those are factored out, all attested PN
systems involve vowel harmony, rather than, for example, the types of surface inventory
reductions characteristic of UVR systems.
In this chapter I contrast two approaches to initial syllable PN effects. One of
these, the phonologization approach familiar from the preceding chapters, attributes
typological regularities found in PN systems to the phonologization of patterns arising
originally in the phonetics. The second approach locates the force generating typological
patterns squarely in Universal Grammar. In the case of initial position, it is the
psycholinguistic status of initial material which is responsible for the attested patterns. It
is the initialness of the material itself, in other words, rather than any concrete attributes
of that material, which is responsible.
I will argue in this chapter that neither the startling rarity of initial-syllable PN
affecting vowels, nor the apparent limitation of true instances of this PN to vowel
harmony follow from the initialness approach. Both these patterns, however, can be
understood as consequences of the phonetic characteristics commonly associated with
initial syllables crosslinguistically. The chapter is structured as follows: Section 2
presents a discussion of the most important recent literature on initial-syllable effects.
Section 3 introduces the phonetic processes commonly associated with initial syllables.
Section 4 begins an analysis of initial-syllable vocalic strength effects in light of what we
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