Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

degrees of reduction in informal speech and lesser degrees in formal speech is correct, as
is the suppression of the reduction of /e/ by speakers of eastern dialects wishing to avoid
detection. But speakers of dialects such as that of Sofia and virtually the entire west and
south of the country are not “suppressing” reduction of /e/ or categorical reduction of /o/
under some sort of social pressure to conform to the literary standard. They are speaking
their native dialects, which happen not to include these features in their grammars. A
speaker whose dialect is close to the standard in this respect (e.g. a Sofian) will at least in
informal speech merge /a/ completely with /â/. The same speaker may even realize some
percentage of utterances of unstressed /o/ in informal speech as overlapping more or less
completely with unstressed /u/. But that speaker will not, no matter how informal, lazy,
drunk, or socially maladjusted, suddenly adopt categorical merger of /e/ and /i/ in
unstressed syllables, because no register of this dialect contains such a process in its
phonological or phonetic grammar.
Crosswhite’s description of neutralizing reduction in Bulgarian is attributed to the
results of an experimental study on the speech of two Bulgarians from villages near Sofia
presented in Wood and Pettersson (1988). Describing these results, she writes:
country, as in the mocking phrase [as sm ud dleku, i uvor meku], “I am from far away, and speak
with automatic palatalization of consonants before front vowels” (lit. ‘softly’).
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