Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

sort demonstrated in Lindblom (1963) and discussed below. I maintain the distinction
between the phonological and the phonetic here, arguing in fact that a number of UVR
patterns commonly identified as phonological in the literature are in fact phonetic in
nature. I demonstrate that these phonetic patterns are no less dramatic in their effect than
their phonological counterparts. Furthermore, I argue that it is these phonetic patterns,
through the medium of phonologization as described in Chapter 1, which account for the
fact that most (but not all) categorical patterns appear phonetically motivated. The
phonologization approach to typological regularities, I argue, gives us a broader and
deeper understanding of the reasons for the existence of those regularities than do
synchronic models with phonetic motivations built into them. Section 2.3 presents three
case studies of unstressed vowel reduction systems which illustrate both the phonetic and
phonological patterns of UVR, as well as the process of phonologization whereby the one
is converted into the other.
Section 2.4 introduces an alternative approach to vowel reduction, that of
Crosswhite (2001). This is a phonetically-driven Optimality-Theoretic study set in the
Licensing-by-Cue framework advocated by Steriade (1994). This model is evaluated in
light of the typological and phonetic findings presented here. Section 2.5 presents a case
study of vowel reduction in Contemporary Standard Russian, a system which presents an
interesting test case for the comparison of the Licensing-by-Cue and phonologization-
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