Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

there could in principle be a phonetic footprint (as it were) of the earlier prosodic system.
I will not dispute the reconstruction of initial stress for Proto-Turkic, though it should be
noted that of the putatively Altaic languages discussed by Poppe, by far the weakest case
for an earlier initial stress can be made for Turkic. Johanson (1998:111) notes that an
assumption of initial stress would help to explain the development of vowel harmony,
early reduction and loss of final vowels, and alliteration patterns in Old Turkic. It is the
purpose of the following to show that there is reason to believe that even without initial
stress enough additional duration is contributed to initial syllable vowels in Modern
Turkish by initial strengthening to give rise. Substantial initial strengthening of
consonants could also have been responsible for giving sufficient prominence to these
that alliteration might stand out as an attractive literary device. As for the reduction of
final vowels, is was noted in chapter 3 that stressed final high vowels in Modern Turkish
are subject to devoicing, and that /a/ is raised toward schwa in Modern Turkish, again
irrespective of the placement of stress. Furthermore, chapter three also cites the abundant
cases in the diachronic literature of other language families (originally) with pitch-cued
accent (e.g. Baltic and Slavic) in which vowels which were indisputably stressed at one
point ultimately see stress retraction and deletion. For none of these problems, then, is an
initial stress the sole (or even an adequate) explanation. The default initial stress in
Chuvash in words containing only reduced vowels does suggest an earlier initial stress,
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