Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

All these cases, while not in fact instances of the development of full-blown
word-domain vowel harmony systems from earlier non-harmonizing reduction systems,
nonetheless suggest there is something to the reduction-then-assimilation hypothesis.
There are a number of reasons, however, why in the cases at hand, such an origin for
harmony is implausible. First, Proto-Turkic is generally reconstructed with some system
of palatal harmony already in place. Assuming that it is correct to reconstruct initial stress
(rather than just phonetic initial strengthening) for Proto-Turkic, it is necessary to bear in
mind that fixed-stress systems are not generally strongly duration-cued and non-duration-
cued stress-systems rarely generate robust patterns of phonological vowel reduction. A
glance across the prosodic systems of the Slavic languages illustrates this point well on a
smaller scale: Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Standard Macedonian with no duration-
cued lexical stress and no phonological vowel reduction, alongside Russian, Belorussian,
Bulgarian and Macedonian dialects with duration-cued phonemic stress and phonological
vowel reduction, to name only the best known cases. For the reduction-first
generalization to be correct for Turkic then, Pre-Proto-Turkic must have been a
counterexample to this generalization. Specifically, it would have had to develop a vowel
reduction system sufficiently sweeping in nature to give rise to the attested harmony
system, and to do so in a system with fixed, non-duration-cued stress. Alternatively, one
might imagine that Turkic fixed stress was at one point duration-cued and later changed.
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