Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

to perceptual proximity to one another cause by one or another language-specific pattern
of shrinking of the vowel space due to durational pressures on articulatory targets. Which
is to say, patterns of merger reflect the directions in which vowels were being shifted
under durational pressure in unstressed syllables 13 . This can be seen in action in the case
studies of Brazilian Portuguese and Bulgarian below, in which different dialects show
phonologized and unphonologized versions of the same patterns.
Since it is chiefly the implementation of vowel height contrasts which is hindered
by the decrease in duration of the unstressed syllable, it is to be expected that unstressed
vowel reduction would primarily impact contrasts of vowel height, leaving other
contrasts, such as those not found to be active in systems of UVR for the most part
unscathed. The phonologization approach thus accounts for the fact that the contrasts
most often involved in vowel reduction systems are precisely those which would be most
severely impacted by serious durational impoverishment. Recent UG-based approaches to
vowel reduction, on the hand, have not even remarked on the existence of the typological
generalization.
13
Crosswhite (2001) points out that merger patterns are not predictable from the synchronic positioning of
the vowels relative to one another in the stressed syllables of the languages in question. This is certainly
true, and underscores the extent to which synchronic patterns of PN are independent from the phonetic
factors which created them. To understand the development of a given UVR pattern, though, it is necessary
to consider not the phonetic realizations of the stressed counterparts of the reducing vowels (since these by
virtue of those very realizations are not in fact subject to mergers), but to the realizations of the unstressed
vowels themselves immediately prior to the phonologization of the synchronic neutralizing patterns.
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