Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

attract stress to sonorous vowels, or to raise the sonority of stressed vowels, à la
Kenstowicz (1994). Crosswhite exemplifies prominence-reducing UVR with Bulgarian,
presented, as noted above, in the form of its eastern dialects, in which neutralizations are
in fact categorical. See section 2.3.1 for discussion of the crucial differences between
systems of UVR in Bulgarian dialects.
Bulgarian, as presented by Crosswhite, has six contrastive vowels under stress: /i,
e, , a, u/. In unstressed syllables, however, the mid vowels are raised to merge with the
high vowels as [i, u], and the low vowel /a/ is raised to merge with the mid central vowel
as // 22 . In other words, constraints against prominent (non-high) vowels in unstressed
syllables interact with Faithfulness constraints to cause the raising of /e, a, o/ to merge
with /i, , u/.
Crucially, the way in which this system differs from that of Belorussian (aside
from the obvious raising vs. lowering of the mid vowels), is in the realization of the low
vowel as schwa. The fact that the high sonority vowel [a] is not allowed in non-prominent
positions is what marks Bulgarian as prominence-reducing rather than contrast-
enhancing.
22 It is interesting to note that most of the dialects which actually have this system of vowel reduction also
have automatic palatalization of consonants before front vowels, which may not be an accidental
correlation in light of the reduction of /e/ to [i] present here and absent or weak in other dialects. There are,
however, dialects with more pronounced palatalization than in these and only weaker, non-neutralizing
reduction of mid vowels; the correlation is thus not automatic.
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