Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

monomoraic and bimoraic vowels. From the phonologization perspective, we would
expect these to be languages in which a vowel quantity contrast was forced to coexist
with strongly duration-cued stress. The phonetic lengthening of short vowels under stress
(common in many languages without long/short contrasts, such as Russian) would
ultimately make the contrast difficult to perceive, eventually resulting in misperceptions
and concomitant reanalysis of the lengthened short vowel as an intended distinctively
long vowel. This phonologization, of course, neutralizes the contrast. It is not surprising,
giving that stressed syllables are, if anything, a lengthening environment, that the output
of this neutralization should be a long vowel. See the discussion of vowel length contrasts
in final syllables in Chapter 3, however, for a more complicated case.
In addition to languages neutralizing quantity contrasts in stressed syllables,
however, there are also attested a fair variety of languages which neutralize length
contrasts in all syllables except the stressed syllable. Kolami (Emeneau 1961: 6-7) and
several other Dravidian languages are examples. Here the initial syllable is stressed, and
long and short vowels do not contrast in non-initial syllables. In Warumungu (Bosch
1991), as in Dravidian, stress is fixed initial, and contrastively long vowels occur only
here. In Jamul Tiipay (Miller 2001), vowels contrast long and short only in the stressed
and immediately pre-stress syllables, with all vowels outside these positions being short.
Also in Burushaski (Anderson 1997), vowel length contrasts exist only in stressed
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