Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

divorced from their phonetic origins and made phonological. Apparent restrictions on
possible systems or principles of “phonetic grounding” operative in the phonology itself
prove to be chimerical and unnecessary. Phonological patterns are grounded in phonetics
by virtue of the fact that they originate in the phonetics in the vast majority of cases.
Once phonologized, however, the relationship between two or more neutralizing entities
is functionally arbitrary and no longer responsive to the phonetic forces which gave rise
to the pattern of neutralization in the first place. Patterns appearing “unnatural” or
phonetically unexpected in the phonology are the result of additional historical
circumstance such as morphological changes motivated by factors such as paradigm
uniformity, or subsequent sound changes which may obscure the phonetic origins of a
process, or the appropriateness of a process to its environment. This view of the role of
phonologization in determining the phonetic shape of phonological patterns has its roots
in the listener-oriented approach to sound change developed by Ohala (1981, 1993a), and
the work on phonologization of Hyman (e.g. 1977). More recent relatives of this
approach are find Blevins and Garrett (1998), Garrett and Blevins (to appear), and the
work of Blevins (in prep.) under the rubric of Evolutionary Phonology. Similar views are
advanced in Kavitskaya (2001) as well.
The alienation described of a pattern of neutralization from its phonetic roots
creates a problem for the phonologist seeking to understand the nature of the processes
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