Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

direct result of the phonologization of phonetic patterns, developed from an earlier
system in which non-initial vowels were subject to palatal harmony, such that while both
front and back vowels occurred, their appearance was conditioned by the frontness or
backness of the vowel of the initial syllable. In many (but not all) Ob-Ugrian dialects it is
the case that the ancestral harmony system has broken down in some way.
In Sosva Mansi, then, even prior to the merger of the front and back non-initial
syllable vowels which created the appearance of a system of UVR, the contrast between
the front and back was already neutralized. This preexisting lack of phonological contrast
along the front/back dimension may have predisposed the language to undergo the
reductions it did further along in its history. I know of no instance of the attestation of a
system similar to this one in which a healthy contrast between front and back vowels was
simply lost to unstressed vowel reduction in the same manner height contrasts are lost in
the development of canonical UVR systems. All this makes Sosva Mansi a typological
rarity, but there is no reason to think that this crosslinguistic fact in any way impedes the
functioning of the system in synchrony. This is unproblematic for the phonologization
approach to typology. Theories seeking to derive the phonetic “motivation” of
typological patterns through the existence of phonetic restrictions in phonological
Universal Grammar, on the other hand, in order to derive the near exceptionless height-
first rule for UVR systems must assume that the UG itself has something against systems
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