Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

the speech stream by marking the beginning of the word with a perceptually-robust low-
sonority to high-sonority CV-transition. Smith presents evidence that robust modulation
of the signal in this way increases the perceptual salience of a syllable.
While it is true, however, that this “strengthening” of the onset of the word could
assist in demarcating a word-boundary, and thus be permitted under Smith’s Segmental
Contrast Condition, it is not at all clear how the requirement that constraints neutralizing
contrasts in initial syllables must assist in the segmentation of speech stream necessarily
limits the Positional Augmentation constraints referencing that position to those affecting
the presence or sonority of onsets alone. If it is the case, as Smith explicitly argues, that
the perceptual robustness of initial material can assist in the segmentation of the speech
stream, and if it is likewise true that a steep rise in sonority at the beginning of a syllable
increases its perceptual prominence (Smith 2002: 78-80), then there is no reason that
raising the sonority of the nucleus of the initial syllable would not be just as effective a
measure in the service of boundary demarcation as would be lowering the sonority of its
onset. The latter is quite well attested, of course, while the former is not known to
occur 116 . The psycholinguistic explanation of the typology here, however, provides no
116 There is the case of Luganda, in which absolute-initial vowels are restricted to /e, a, o/ out of a standard
five-vowel inventory, and these not contrasting in quantity (they have been described as obligatorily long,
though Hubbard’s experimental results are somewhat equivocal on this matter), but this restriction does not
concern initial syllables with onsets (Hubbard: 161) . See below for further discussion.
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