Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

lengthening, together potentially with articulatory strengthening of the type documented
in pre-boundary elements in English by Cho (2001). The phonetics of domain-final
position, however, unlike that of the stressed syllable, is not uniformly prominence-
enhancing. Together with final lengthening and strengthening, final syllables, especially
above the level of the word, see dramatic drops in subglottal pressure. The significantly
lower intensity and pitch of the domain-final material, often accompanied by developing
non-standard phonation types can lead to phonologization of, among other things, a
pattern of weak licensing potential for the final syllable, such that in some languages
neutralizations take place in final position alone. The range of final syllable
neutralizations is catalogued and phonetic explanations for each are discussed. The
diversity of patterns found in domain-final syllables is a problem for an approach
assuming the inherent strength or weakness or structural positions to be encoded in UG.
An approach deriving the typology of positional neutralization from the phonologization
of common phonetic patterns, on the other hand, predicts precisely this ambiguous
behavior on the part of final syllables.
Chapter 4 presents an analysis of licensing asymmetries between initial and non-
initial syllables, the first regularity of which is the surprising rarity of unambiguous cases
of the positional neutralization of vowel contrasts in initial syllables. The majority of
cases presented as such in the literature turn out also to have (or have had at the crucial
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