Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

implementation of initial strengthening between duration of the initial-syllable vowel and
the VOT of the preceding consonant. As in most of the initial-strengthening studies,
unfortunately, here comparisons are only among initial-syllable vowels at the left edge of
prosodic domains of differing levels. No comparison is made between initial-syllable
vowels (phrase-initially or phrase-medially) and comparable vowels in word-internal
syllables. Certainly for predictions concerning lexical-level licensing asymmetries this
would be among the most important measures to be taken.
To assess the possibility that in certain languages initial strengthening does in fact
affect initial-syllable vowels in a way that could ultimately lead to the phonologization of
initial-syllable licensing asymmetries such as those found throughout Central Eurasia and
sub-Saharan Africa, I constructed an experiment investigating the durations of initial
syllable vowels in Turkish and English. English was selected as a control for the
experiment, as previous work (Fougeron and Keating 1996, Byrd 2000) had found no
significant lengthening of initial syllable vowels in that language. Turkish was selected
due to persistent reports in the literature and impressionistic observations in my own
fieldwork that, despite fixed final stress in most of the native lexicon, something on the
order of durational enhancement was nonetheless afoot in the Turkish initial syllable.
There is, of course, a potential confound here, since as noted above, Proto-Turkic is
generally reconstructed with fixed initial stress, so that any additional duration found
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