Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

phonologization. Recent work in a similar vein includes Blevins and Garrett (1998),
Garrett and Blevins (to appear), and the work of Blevins (in prep.) under the rubric of
Evolutionary Phonology. Chapter 1 of this dissertation sketches how the interaction of
phonetics and phonology through phonologization takes place, while Chapters 2 through
4 demonstrate the operation of phonetic principles in phonologization.
Chapter 2 demonstrated that the vast majority of unstressed vowel reduction
patterns are based on the neutralization of vowel height contrasts due to perceptual
difficulties caused by the shrinking of the vowel space produced by duration-dependent
undershoot. This very specific and highly consistent, indeed nearly exceptionless pattern
makes perfect sense in the phonologization model of typological patterning. UG-based
approaches such as that of Crosswhite (2001), on the hand, predict a wide variety of
completely unattested patterns, while failing to provide sufficient rationale for the
restricted nature of the attested patterns.
Chapter Three dealt with the behavior of the final syllable in phonology, showing
at once a widespread tendency for final syllables to resist various neutralization processes
which might otherwise apply to them, but also in some languages themselves to be the
target of neutralization processes not affecting other prosodically and segmentally
comparable targets. The ambiguous nature of the final syllable, I argued, is due to the
complexity of the phonetic patterns characteristic of vowels in this position, and thus
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