Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

which was later attracted to heavy syllables further to the right (though see Dobrovolsky
1999 and following this Gordon 2000 for phonetic data suggesting that the initial pitch
peak in Chuvash words is better analyzed as an intonational rather than a stress
prominence). Be this as it may, some scholars continue to maintain, along with
Turkologists like Poppe, that Modern Anatolian Turkish continues to have both a pitch
accent on the final syllable and a “dynamic stress” generally, though not always on the
initial syllable (Csató and Johanson 1998: 207). It is my contention that what these
scholars are in fact hearing is initial strengthening of onset consonants and vowels in a
language which otherwise has a non-duration-cued fixed final stress. The following
sections discuss my experimental results and the implications thereof for the development
of palatal harmony systems of the Eurasian type.
4.5. Vowel harmony and initial syllables
The wide attestation of progressive vowel harmonies proceeding (at least
historically) from the initial syllable in many languages without initial stress (such as
Turkic or Bantu) demands an explanation. In such systems, only the initial syllable of the
word realizes the language’s full set of contrasts, while in non-initial syllables certain
features are predictable from the specification of the vowel in the initial syllable. In
languages with progressive palatal vowel harmony, such as Turkish, the frontness or
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