Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

dialects, Walker notes the differences between these patterns and, for example, stressed-
syllable triggered harmonies (also present in Romance dialects). She characterizes the
two patterns as based on different phonetic motivations and deserving of different
synchronic treatments. Walker too sees the metaphony patterns as resulting from the
perceptual weakness of the triggering segment (inherent or positionally acquired), and
attributes the feature spreading not to misperception, but to the purposeful extension of
perceptually-weak features to phonetically-prominent positions such as the stressed
syllable. Both the realization of the weak(ened) features in a perceptually-more-
hospitable environment and the mere fact that the extended feature now occurs over a
span of longer duration would contribute to increased perceptual robustness. Here Walker
is invoking the principle central to the thesis of Kaun’s treatment of rounding harmony
(which Kaun attributes in part to Suomi 1983): bad vowels spread (perceptually difficult
contrasts are more easily perceived if they are realized over longer spans within the
word). To which it seems necessary to add, in the case of metaphonies involving major
distinctions in vowel height, that in fact even good vowels will spread if they wind up in
bad enough neighborhoods. The notion behind Walker’s story then is essentially a
functionalist one, in which the spreading of vowel features takes place in order to
preserve vowel contrasts which are otherwise in danger of collapse due to features of
their environments. Walker notes in this connection a generalization made by Dyck
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