Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

strength effects in final position, nor does it predict the differences observed between the
strength effects found in stressed and final syllables. 77 In an approach making no explicit
connection to phonetic factors, one in which the Strength or Weakness of a given position
is merely the stipulated ability of the grammar (in OT, Con) to formulate Faithfulness or
Markedness constraints parametrized to that position, Strength effects are simply the
interaction of those constraints with their general equivalents. The free reranking of these
constraints in turn explicitly predicts that a given (generable) neutralization pattern will
be just as likely to surface in one Strong position as in any other. The typological facts
tell us otherwise, making the abstract grammatical approach alone a poor predictor of
crosslinguistic typology.
An approach incorporating phonetic information into the grammar, on the other
hand, such as Steriade’s Licensing-by-Cue or other direct phonetics approaches such as
that of Flemming (2001) do far better in this respect. In the sections above I have
demonstrated the striking isomorphism between the distribution of phonetic duration and
the occurrence and patterning of strength effects in final position. Now we can take up
the differences between the strength effects in stressed and final syllables and examine
the phonetic origins thereof.
77 Put more strongly, without further elaboration of some kind (e.g. of the type proposed by Smith 2002), it
actually predicts the non-existence of those restrictions and differences.
165