Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

developed from an earlier schwa, such that in stressed syllables schwa become /e/, while
in unstressed it merged with /u/ (whatever the details of this latter merger may be). To
model this correspondence in terms of phonetic pressures would simply misrepresent the
situation, since there is clearly no sense in which synchronically Seediq /e/ is being
reduced in unstressed syllables ever closer to [u] in unstressed syllables until finally some
threshold for minimum distance is crossed and the contrast must be abandoned. Indeed,
this never took place even diachronically, as it turns out. Yet the fact that Seediq UVR
cannot be modeled in this way implies that synchronically the correspondence between
Seediq stressed /e/ and posttonic unstressed [u] is of a completely different order than the
relationship between Russian stressed /o/ and unstressed [a] or Brazilian stressed /o/ and
posttonic [u]. The latter two cases would be instances of real UVR, while the former
would have to receive some completely different formal implementation, making it an
instance of some other, different process altogether. This may have been the case in
diachrony, but in synchrony I see no reason to treat any of these cases as anything other
than the phonetically arbitrary substitution of one abstract symbol for another in the same
structural position. All three cases are thus equally examples of a type of categorical
positional neutralization known as unstressed vowel reduction.
The all-phonetic approach makes diachronic predictions as well which seem not
to be supported by the evidence. As discussed above, the application of UVR in
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