Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

emoval of “particularly loud and lengthy vowel qualities” from unstressed syllables. The
basic idea behind prominence reduction is that prominent segments should be aligned to
prominent positions, while non-prominent segments should be aligned to non-prominent
positions. Crosswhite conceives of prominent segments as those which are more
sonorous, where sonority for her a measure derived from a combination of phonetic
factors, including at least duration and low-frequency amplitude (2001: 37). For the
purposes of vowel reduction, this measure characterizes differences in vowel height, with
the caveat that unstressed schwa, conceived of as a placeless, targetless vowel, is less
sonorous even than the high vowels. Prominent positions for our purposes here are
stressed syllables. Crosswhite is careful in all this, incidentally, to distinguish prominence
reduction from the gestural undershoot of Lindblom (1963), discussed above. Briefly, her
reasons are this: “...in vowel undershoot, decreased articulation time leads to a change in
vowel quality, and can be traced to a desire to avoid effortful articulations (i.e. ones in
which articulator movement must be fast). In contrast, in prominence-reducing vowel
reduction, a change in vowel quality leads to a decrease in articulation time” (p. 46). Her
argument is with the employment of articulatory undershoot to derive categorical UVR
patterns synchronically. In OT terms, prominence reduction is implemented in a manner
similar to that which Prince and Smolensky (1993) use to derive the role of sonority in
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