Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

unstressed /e/ toward [u], finally resulting in reanalysis (an implausible tendency at best).
The authors describing these facts offer no explanation of the rise of this pattern, and not
all the facts are clear to me still concerning precisely what did happen, but the crucial
pieces of the puzzle appear to be these: Stressed /e/ in Seediq comes from *Proto-
Austronesian // (Asai 1953: 13). Asai likewise attests that when deprived of stress, /e/ is
realized as [, , ]. He also claims that /i/ has the same realizations in unstressed
syllables, but gives examples of this only in pretonic syllables. By contrast, there are
plenty of instances of posttonic [i] throughout the grammar (e.g. [mari] ‘buy’, [mhei]
‘bearing fruits’), but apparently none of [e]. It is plausible to assume, in fact, given
available information, that [e] never arose outside stressed syllables in the first place in
Seediq. In any case, the second crucial piece of information is that in the Paran dialect at
the time of Asai’s writing (1953), *PAN /u/, realized as such even in other Atayalic
dialects, is being realized as [] under stress in Seediq. About this transcription, too,
Asai is quite specific, describing it that a high, back, non-round vowel. At least some
instances of */u/ > Seediq rounded [] are attested in Asai, particularly in final
syllables 40 : [kkh] < *kuku ‘claw, and others. It is not clear to me whether this holds of
all and/or only final syllables, as examples in Asai are few. What is clear, however, is that
40 It is tempting to see the final syllable [] realization as crucial to the UVR pattern, but without a better
understanding of the distribution of this reflex this might be premature.
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