Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

affixes fail to undergo reduction, presumably due to the need to preserve morphological
contrasts. But I know of no system in which vowels of all initial syllables, onset or no,
are exempt from a process of unstressed vowel reduction that otherwise targets all
unstressed vowels. This gap in the typology is expected given the predictions made above
as to which languages should exhibit initial-syllable vowel strengthening and which
should not. It was predicted that languages like English, in which duration is cued
strongly or primarily by stress, should not implement phonetic initial-syllable vowel
strengthening. Since, however, it is precisely these languages in which we expect to find
systems of unstressed vowel reduction (and not in those, like Turkish, with small or non-
existent durational differences between stressed and unstressed syllables), the fact that the
two phenomena should not be found to cooccur is unsurprising. In sum, the
phonologization approach to initial-syllable strength effects provides an account which is
far more accurate than that provided by other approaches, and which allows us to
understand both the differences and similarities between PN effects found in initial
syllables and those affecting the other positions surveyed in this study.
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