Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

question. The point is that the relationship between long and short inventories is of a
different nature altogether, and that phenomena affecting this relationship and that of
stressed and unstressed vowels in UVR systems may be similar, but are not directly
comparable. That stress shifts in Slovene may result in categorical alternations between
contrastively long high vowels and [] (formerly a short high vowel) indicates the
disconnect between potential synchronic alternations and the phonetic patterns commonly
giving rise to vowel reduction, but does not necessarily add to the list of patterns that
phonetic motivations need account for.
A more convincing instance of high vowel front/back neutralization in unstressed
syllables only comes from the history of Welsh (Bosch 1996, Williams 1989). In
Northern Welsh there is a synchronic pattern whereby final [, u] alternate with
penultimate []. Synchronically this case is complicated by the fact that stress in Northern
Welsh is penultimate, making this an instance of non-augmenting reduction in strong
position 12 . Additionally, there are lexical exceptions to the reduction of []. It appears that
non-reducing [] is actually original, while reducing [] is derived from an earlier /y/,
which later merged with //. The original reduction, then, was of /y/ and /u/ to []. The
case is complicated, and in any event not an instance of the elimination of all front/back
12 This stress, however, is not duration-cued (Williams 1989). In fact, Welsh final syllables are routinely
longer than stressed penults. This is a result of the fact that stress was previously final, but upon retraction
to the penult, left behind traces of that earlier stage in the form of increased duration.
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