Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

4.5.3. Consequences of domain-initial strengthening: The Emergence of Turkic
Palatal Harmony
The experimental results given above demonstrate the application of domain-
initial strengthening to the vowels of initial syllables in Turkish. This process represents a
source of additional phonetic duration in initial syllables independent of the initial
stresses discussed above for Uralic, Dravidian, and at least some of the languages
grouped as Altaic. Since the fixed initial stresses in those languages are not known to be
strongly duration-cued, any additional duration contributed by stress to those initial
syllables might well be on the order of that documented here in the initial unstressed
syllables of Turkish. If strengthening of initial-syllable vowels ultimately turns out to be
more widely attested in languages with non-duration-cued stress, this process may
represent a second source for the initial-syllable phonological strength effects attested in
the literature. Still, it is not at all clear how a small-scale durational asymmetry of the
type documented above could develop into word-bounded phonological vowel harmony
of the Turkic variety. The following presents a possible solution to this problem.
4.5.3.1. Does vowel harmony come from vowel reduction?
It is often observed that vowel harmony and vowel reduction share many common
features, most notably that they both involve the positional neutralization of vowel
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