Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

notion of umlaut or metaphony being motivated primarily by the perceptual weakness of
the trigger (as opposed to its phonetic salience, as Steriade suggests for Pasiego) is
central to Ohala’s theory of sound change (as in e.g. Ohala 1993, discussed below). Its
isolation as the feature differentiating harmonies proceeding from non-prominent to
prominent positions (perception-based) from those from operating from prominent to
non-prominent (articulation-based) is the central thesis of McCormick (1982), and is
explored more recently in Majors (1998: 160-167) and Walker (2001).
From a diachronic point of view such patterns have a relatively straightforward
explanation. Specifically, they are examples of hypocorrective change, in the Ohalian
parlance (Ohala passim , but especially e.g. 1993). The term hypocorrective change refers
to instances in which the listener hears, for example, the coarticulatory effect on a vowel
of a neighboring segment, but rather than correctly attributing it to its actual source and
disregarding it, or taking it as a remote cue for the identity of the source segment, the
speaker instead takes the extended feature to be a property of the vowel in question, and
constructs a new underlying representation for the form as result. A simple example
would be the development of a contrastively nasal vowel from an earlier vowel-nasal
sequence. In Ohala’s schema, the speaker, with a UR of /VN/, produces the coarticulated
sequence [vN]. The listener then fails to attribute the nasalization he or she hears to the
following nasal consonant, hearing instead [v], and believing this to be the speaker’s
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