Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

earlier /u/ is being realized regularly as [] in stressed syllables in Asai’s description,
but in Li’s and Holmer’s later work, also based on direct work with speakers, all these
stressed reflexes of */u/ are transcribed as [u], with no indication that they are
pronounced any other way (Though unstressed /u/ is said to vary from [u] to [] to [],
note that all three variants imply rounding).
Asai reports far more variation in the realization of unstressed vowels than do the
later researchers, perhaps indicating relatively recent transformation of the processes
from gradient to categorical, which they now seem to be. Whether or not this is the case,
what must have happened in Seediq is as follows: Stressed /e/ alternates with unstressed
[, , ], which must be contextual variants of one another. Unstressed [] must have
been realized in this same range, such that the two vowels become phonologically
neutralized in unstressed syllables. Then at some point before the stage described by Li
and Holmer, the pronunciation of [] became rounded across the board, including the
unstressed allophones of /e/. This is reflected in the current situation, where no mention
of a high back unrounded vowel is made in either account, and /e/ alternates with /u/ in
unstressed syllable. The unstressed inventory created by these processes is, it must be
noted, perfectly well dispersed (it is even tempting to attribute the rounding of [] to the
enhancement of the contrast between high vowels, increasing the goodness of the
dispersion). The problem is the relationship between /e/ and /u/, curious from both
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