Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

utterance final phrases with no F0 contour marking the end of the phrase, more
lengthening in non-utterance final phrases with boundaries marked by a clear F0 contour,
and the most lengthening of all utterance-finally. Ueyama finds more pre-boundary
lengthening in Japanese Intonational Phrases than in lower-level Accentual Phrases.
While Beckman and Edwards 1990 report a certain degree of (phrase-internal) word-final
lengthening in English, this lengthening is clearly less robust both in degree and
consistency of application than is the pre-boundary lengthening they detect at the ends of
higher-level phrases. The implicational statement following from this observation seems
valid for all languages in which final lengthening has been measured or described: the
occurrence of lengthening before a lower-level domain boundary implies the occurrence
of lengthening at all higher levels. As will be shown below, this pattern is mirrored in the
crosslinguistic distribution of positional neutralization effects involving final position as
well: if a domain-final effect applies before a phrase-internal word-boundary, it will
apply when that word boundary coincides with higher-level phrase boundaries as well.
The reverse is not the case.
Additional phonetic characteristics of final lengthening, in particular issues
concerning its articulatory implementation and domain of application, will be discussed
later on in this chapter in connection with the phonological patterns to which they are
relevant. For now it is sufficient to characterize domain-final lengthening as a phonetic
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