Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

(specified by Minimum Distance constraints), after which there is a break in the
continuum following which neutralization must occur, and for all durations below a
certain boundary mid vowels will simply be realized as high vowels. We picture an /e/
which becomes gradually more and more [i]-like down to X ms., after which realizations
jump from [i] minus Y Hz at X ms straight to [i] at X + 1 ms. But no such systems seem
to exist. Rather, systems are either neutralizing or non-neutralizing, phonologized or
unphonologized, as detailed in Chapter 2. Russian /o/ does not become gradually more
[a]-like in unstressed syllables until it reaches the threshold of contrastibility and leaps to
become identical to /a/. It is simply realized in the same distribution as /a/ in all
unstressed syllables regardless of duration. I argued in Chapter 2 that this is because after
phonologization a neutralization process is nothing more than the substitution of one
abstract symbol for another in a given structurally-definable position, completely
divorced from whatever phonetic trends or pressures may ultimately have given rise to
the phonologization in question.
What all this means is that when we speak of direct reference to phonetics in the
phonology, we cannot mean this literally at the level of the individual token in speech
production. Some relativizing or generalizing process must be able to intervene, such that
the phonetic representations and values the grammar evaluates are actually more like
statistical generalizations over distributions of concrete tokens, rather than values for the
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