Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

nature. Instead, it is constrained by other factors, what we might call grammatical,
cognitive, or systemic.
Thus, UVR systems based on the neutralization of, e.g. palatality contrasts should
not arise naturally through phonologization, since the phonetic patterns which would
create such systems seem not to arise. Other diachronic developments, however, not
constrained by phonetic factors, could ultimately conspire to produce inventories of this
sort, just as I will argue below that other phonetically unmotivated correspondences can
arise through analogical extensions or layered sound changes. In contrast to “direct
phonetics” models of positional neutralization, however, in which the phonetic
naturalness of the majority of extant phonological patterns is derived online in the
synchronic phonological grammar, the phonologization model predicts only the
improbability of the genesis of unnatural patterns. Should they ultimately come to exist
by whatever circuitous path, however, the abstract, categorical phonology assumed here,
devoid as it is of restrictions on the phonetic content of its patterns, should have no
trouble implementing the typologically disfavored patterns. The case of the vowel
systems of the Ob-Ugrian languages (Finno-Ugric) Khanty and Mansi provide evidence
that this is so. In the Sosva dialect of Mansi, for example, in the non-initial syllable only
/i, e, , a/ are contrasted (Honti 1988: 335), meaning that front and back vowels are
contrasted only in the initial, stressed syllable. This system, predicted not to arise as the
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