Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

meaning that the contrast in question is neutralized whenever one of the terms involved
comes to occupy a particular structural position in the word or phrase. This Trubetzkoy
opposed to “contextually conditioned” neutralization, in which the collapse of contrasts is
triggered by, for example, segmental environment through processes such as assimilation,
dissimilation and the like. I will use the term positional neutralization throughout this
work in its maximally generic sense, referring to any instance of an asymmetrical
capacity of two positions (or sets of positions) in the representation to license
phonological contrasts, such that one set of structural positions licenses a larger array of
contrasts than another. Specifically, one set of positions, termed “weak”, allows
realization of only a subset of the range of contrasts available in another set of positions,
termed “strong”. In this sense positional neutralization refers not only to instances in
which contrasts are lost through mergers in weak positions, but also to cases in which
licensing asymmetries arise through, for example, the emergence of new contrasts in
strong positions.
In my treatment of PN systems, I defend an approach to the phonetics-phonology
interface recognizing a complete separation between a gradient phonetics and an abstract
categorical phonology in a manner similar to that advocated in Keating (1996, inter alia).
Functioning as they do with different sets of primitives, the only link between these two
systems comes in diachrony, as naturally arising language-specific phonetic patterns are
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