Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

patterns such as those treated in this study arise through the phonologization of phonetic
patterns, which are natural by definition. Barring any further developments then, the
overwhelming majority phonological pattern will obey phonetic “restrictions” as an
automatic consequence of their diachronic origin. Patterns of morphological change,
subsequent sound changes, or even instances such as Seediq UVR in which two unrelated
sound changes apply to the same segment in different environments can ultimately
disrupt the uniformity of the naturalness pattern by creating correspondences in
synchronic PN systems which no longer operate in accord with their original phonetic
logic. But such cases are the exception rather than the norm, involving as they do
phonetically motivated sound changes plus some number of additional complicating
developments.
It is not therefore necessary to assume that the categorical phonology restricts the
phonetic content of the patterns it implements in order to account for the fact that the vast
majority of sound patterns appear to be phonetically grounded or natural. Such an
assumption, in fact, makes the undesirable prediction that the phonology should contain
only sound patterns which are phonetically grounded, or at the very least that processes
such as those described in the preceding paragraph should be strongly selected against by
the phonology. We might expect, for example, that phonetically unmotivated alternations,
where they succeeded in arising at all, would be pressured out of the phonology over
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