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Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

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syllabification syllable. Crosswhite assumes two “phonetic” scales, one <strong>of</strong> accentual<br />

prominence, the other <strong>of</strong> vowel prominence, as shown in (7) 21 :<br />

(7) Phonetic Scales for prominence-reducing UVR<br />

a. Accentual Prominence:<br />

stressed prom> unstressed<br />

b. Vowel Prominence<br />

a prom> , prom> e, o prom> i,u prom> <br />

The first scale encodes the fact that stressed syllables are more prominent than<br />

unstressed, while the second encodes the familiar Sonority Hierarchy. These scales are<br />

then "crossed" to produce the relevant constraint families, resulting in fixed rankings <strong>of</strong><br />

markedness constraints such as that shown in (8):<br />

(8) Prominence reduction family <strong>of</strong> constraints<br />

*Unstressed/a >> *Unstressed/, >> *Unstressed/e,o >> *Unstressed/i,u >>*Unstressed/<br />

The result is a set <strong>of</strong> constraints banning high sonority vowels from unstressed<br />

positions in a ranking from most sonorous to least. Crossing the scales in the other<br />

direction (producing, e.g., *stressed/) would create constraints that could be used to<br />

21 The scales assumed by P & S were Syllabic Prominence, distinguishing the Peak from the Margin, and<br />

Segmental Prominence, based as here on sonority.<br />

80

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