Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

eduction to schwa in Russian and in the resistance of absolute front vowels to
centralization in Nawuri (Casali 1995). Increased syllable duration may also potentially
be implicated in the reduction of the five vowel inventory of Luganda to three vowels ([e,
a, o]) morpheme-initially (Hubbard 1994). There is also evidence of this process from the
literature on initial strengthening. Absolute word-initial vowels are realized somewhat
longer than word-internal vowels in French and English (Fougeron 1999, Turk and
Shattuck-Hufnagel 2000).
Furthermore, contrary to the expectations engendered by the synchronic
psycholinguistic approach, there are indeed instances of the phonologization of initial
syllable effects only in higher prosodic domains: In some dialects of Runyambo, for
example, word-initial /i, u/ are lowered to [e, o] after pause (Larry Hyman, p.c.). The
origin of this pattern in the phonetic durational increase and sonority enhancement
characteristic of initial strengthening should be abundantly clear. It is certainly true that
phonologized versions of initial strengthening effects tend to apply at the lexical, rather
than the phrasal level, making patterns such as that of Runyambo comparatively rare. But
is this not also true of other phonologization patterns originating in phrase-level
phonetics, such word-final obstruent devoicing? It is generally accepted that final
devoicing has phonetic motivation at the phrase level, while at the word level this
motivation is at least weak if not absent (Gordon 1998, Hock 1999). Yet, phonological
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