Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

applying to a single phonological entity, the output of which is two distinct, narrowly-
specified phonetic distributions, and a phonological process changing the categorical
feature specification of a given phonological entity in a given context such that the two
resulting phonological representations are realized as two distinct, narrowly-specified
phonetic distributions? In other words, how can we distinguish /a/ -> /a/ -[a] in stressed
syllables and /a/ -> /a/ - [] in unstressed from /a/ -> /a/ -[a] in stressed syllables and /a/ -
> // -[] in unstressed? If /a/ and // contrast underlying and have identical distributions
in the syllables in question, the process must be assumed to be phonologically
neutralizing. If there is no underlying //, however, the situation becomes ambiguous, and
is not, I argue, resolvable through an appeal to phonetic distributions. In such situations
we must consider the process to involve changes in phonological feature specifications
only in such case as the output specification can be shown to be phonologically relevant
to some other process. Where there is no evidence that the features in question are
phonologically relevant (for the linguist and the learner alike), there is no reason to
assume that any change in the category membership of the phonological entity in
question has taken place. If /a/, for example, is realized as something like [] in
unstressed syllables and the process is non-neutralizing, we can assume either that the
phonetic targets for /a/ in unstressed syllables are such that it is realized phonetically as
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