Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

n. Timugon Murut (Austronesian, NE Borneo) (Prentice 1972, Kroeger 1992)
Inventory: /i, a, o, u/
Reduction: /o/ is not contrastive in pretonic syllables. All occurrences are derivable
synchronically from left-to-right spreading of [round] 68
Resistance: /o/ does occur contrastively in the stressed (penultimate) syllable and
final syllables (closed or open) (see note 51 on Shimakonde). Furthermore, [o] only
surfaces in stressed syllables if the following syllable also contains [o], meaning that
the distribution of [o] is actually least restricted in the (posttonic) final. See below for
a cautionary tale, however, on the dangers of extrapolating claims of special final
prominence from distributional evidence alone.
3.2.3.1. The phonetic roots of Final Resistance
This pattern of final syllable resistance to vowel reduction or assimilation
processes is very much expected given what is known about the phonetics of domain-
final syllables crosslinguistically. If these processes target vowels which are for whatever
reason durationally-deficient, final lengthening would naturally serve to exempt the
vowels of final syllables from the effects of the duration-sensitive processes. Qualitative
vowel reduction as in Russian or Brazilian Portuguese targets unstressed vowels and
occurs primarily in languages with strongly duration-cued stress (see Chapter 2). In
Nawuri, centralization exempts specifically long vowels, absolute-initial vowels, and
phrase-final vowels, as noted, all three positions characteristically associated with
68 Neighboring related languages (e.g. Dusunic Kimaragang, Kroeger 1992) merge /a/ and /o/ in pretonic
syllables as //. This situation is most likely the immediate precursor to the distribution in Timugon Murut,
which seems to have restored full vowel quality to pretonic non-highs, with [a] and [o] predictable from the
identity of the stressed syllable vowel.
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