Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

steady across UVR systems, the mapping relationships between the vowels of the two
inventories vary wildly from language to language. Thus, while in the Eastern Central
Catalan seven-to-five reduction, /e, , a/ merge as [], /u, o, / merge as [u], and /i/ is
realized as [i], in Berguener Romansh /i, e/ merge as [i], /u, o/ merge as /u/, and /, , a/
are realized as [], and in Brazilian Portuguese posttonic syllables /i, e, / merge as [i], /u,
o, / merge as [u], and /a/ is realized as []. By the same token, while in the Standard
Italian seven-to-five reduction /e, / merge as [e], /o, / merge as [o], and [a] is raised
slightly toward schwa, in Loniu unstressed syllables /, , a/ are realized as [] while /i, e,
o, u/ stay more or less in place. Finally, in the five/six-to-three systems cited above, in
Eastern Bulgarian /i, e/ merge as [i], /u, o/ merge as [u], and /, a/ merge as [], while in
Belorussian /e, a, o/ merge as [a~] leaving /i, u/ in place, and in Seediq post tonic /i, a/
are not neutralized, while /e, o, u/ merge as [u]. Partial, sometimes asymmetrical variants
of these basic system types are also well-attested, all of which indicates the central role
played by language-specific phonetic patterns of unstressed vowel realization in
determining which vowels will ultimately undergo phonologized merger. Crucially,
however, in all cases systems are oriented around the elimination of height contrasts in
unstressed syllables.
Conspicuous in their absence are the unstressed vowel reduction analogues of the
common vowel harmony systems of the world. Specifically, UVR systems based on the
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