Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

that psycholinguistic status is in some way responsible for the fact that final syllables are
phonetically prominent in the first place (though of course given that final lengthening
appears to be primarily a phrasal rather than a lexical process, this seems unlikely). Be
this as it may, I claim here that the specific phonetic characteristics of segments realized
in final position which give rise to crosslinguistic regularities in the forms and
distributions of final strength effects. It is therefore these phonetic characteristics to
which we must turn for an explanation of those regularities.
3.3. Why Final Strength is different from Stressed Syllable Strength
At this point it is possible to return to the two general approaches to Positional
Neutralization sketched and contrasted in Chapters 1 and 2. For stressed syllables a
phonetically-motivated approach like Licensing-by-Cue, despite the serious failings it
was shown to have in Chapter 2, does at least make the prediction that vowel reduction
should occur most readily in languages in which duration is a primary cue for stress, a
prediction which a purely structural approach obviously fails to make. Here too the two
approaches differ in the degree of success they enjoy in accounting for the typological
regularities observed in the patterns and distributions of phonological strength effects.
The purely structural account of PN, which we may call the Monolithic Strength
approach, again does not predict the existence of regular restrictions on the nature of
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