Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Pettersson and Wood started their investigation by first verifying the existence of
acoustically neutralizing vowel reduction using spectrographic evidence - the formant
frequencies measured for unstressed /e,o,a/ were found to coincide with those
measured for the vowels /i,u,/, respectively. Since there was no acoustic difference
in vowel quality reflecting these underlying vowel contrasts, we can state that
Bulgarian vowel reduction is acoustically neutralizing” (Crosswhite 2001: 42).
But this is simply false, both as a characterization of vowel reduction in the Sofia dialect,
and as a characterization of the experimental findings of Pettersson and Wood (1987).
What Pettersson and Wood actually report is the opposite 16 : On pages 244-247 they show
scatterplots of their results for unstressed vowels spoken in isolation, and also in frame
sentences. Unsurprisingly, there is a tendency toward more reduction in the frame
sentences than in forms spoken in isolation. For one speaker in the isolated words even
unstressed /a/ and /â/ form clearly distinct, if overlapping, distributions. Since they
provide no statistical analysis, it is hard to see whether otherwise /a/ and /â/ form one
distribution or two. /o/ and /u/ overlap for both speakers, but in both contexts many of the
realizations of /o/ fall well outside the distribution for /u/. Again, statistical analysis
would say for certain. For /e/ and /i/, however, there is very little overlap for either
speaker at either rate, to say nothing of a single distribution. Most importantly, to the
16
It may be that the confusion is in their use of the term neutralizing, which they employ in several places
in an articulatory sense, meaning “becoming more neutral”. For example, on p. 240, of the failure of mid
and low vowels to merge completely in many dialects they say the following: “... selective relaxation of
articulatory control and neutralization of components of the unreduced vowel would diminish articulatory
precision and lead to a spectral transition between unreduced and fully reduced forms.” Describing as they
are a gradient “transition” from one vowel to another, they clearly do not mean neutralization in the sense
of Aufhebung. They then continue, “Alternatively (italics mine), switching between complete
configurations, by substituting [i] for [e] etc. in the underlying motor programme would lead to discrete
shifts between reduced and non-reduced forms”, viz. actual neutralization.
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