Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

types of position-specific constraints which can be formulated by the grammar. The
typological patterns we wish to account for here flow directly from the categorical
phonological grammar, and as Smith argues, since the constraints in question have the
entire initial syllable as their domain, should in principle hold for all elements within that
domain equally. This is not the case, which the psycholinguistically-based phonology
model fails to predict. The phonetically-based phonologization model, on the other hand,
predicts precisely the attested asymmetry, whether the phonetic patterns in question
ultimately have psycholinguistic motivations (as is potentially the case with initial
strengthening) or are general properties of motor systems linguistic and non-linguistic (as
with final lengthening).
Smith discusses domain-initial strengthening in the context of determining the
precise domain to be referred to by the phonological constraints producing positional
licensing asymmetries. She decides ultimately on the morphological word rather than the
prosodic word for a number of reasons. The first and most important of these is that
initial-strengthening is phonetic, and hence “cannot be directly related to true initial-
syllable augmentation effects, which are phonological” (Smith 2002: 312). The gradience
and interspeaker variability in implementation of initial strengthening distinguish it from,
for example, categorical prohibitions on onsets above a given sonority level. Likewise,
the fact that initial strengthening is stronger in the higher prosodic domains is troubling,
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