Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

ample time for the gestural target of the low vowel to be reach. This exception to the
reduction of /a/~/o/ to schwa thus follows from the same duration-based phonetic
principles as failure to reduce in absolute initial position: reduction occurs where
phonetic durations are substantially impoverished, and fails where additional duration is
realized. Crosswhite derives the failure of /a/~/o/ to reduce to schwa in hiatus to a
constraint *Hiatus([a], []), which states that the featureless vowel [] may not occur in
hiatus with [a].
In addition to all this, there is one additional position in which non-first-pretonic
/a/ and /o/ fail to reduce to schwa not treated by Crosswhite. In phrase-final open
syllables, /a/ and /o/ are realized as [], just as they are in the first pretonic syllable. This
realization is said to depend on style, speech rate, and to be gradient, sometimes
producing a vowel in between Degree 1 and Degree2 reduction (Matusevic 1976: 102,
Zlatoustova 1962: 109-139). Non-reduction only occurs when the vowel is final in the
phrase, with phrase-internal word-final vowels reduced to schwa along with the other
non-first-pretonic unstressed vowels. In section 3.2.3, I attribute this rate-dependent
failure to reduce to the additional duration provided by phrase-final lengthening, robustly
attested in Russian. Again, failure to reduce to schwa is predictable according to the
phonetic duration of the vowel.
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