Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

final strength effects are often found at the level of the phrase rather than the word, that
final syllables are rarely if ever the sole strong licensers of vowel contrasts in the word
domain, and that Final Resistance in the vast majority of cases targets only the vowels of
final open syllables, rather than final syllables of any shape. A Pure Prominence approach
to PN effects in final position predicts none of this.
In this section I present a sketch of how the phonetic details treated above are
transformed into phonological patterns through the medium of phonologization. In many
ways the process is similar to that described for stressed syllables in Chapter 2, though
here additional details (including interaction with the phonologization of UVR) make this
process worth additional attention.
Just as with the UVR, final strength effects start off gradient, and become
categorical through the process of phonologization. This is even clearer, in fact, in the
case of final syllables, where the phonetic roots of the effect are most robustly observed
in the gradient application of phrase-final lengthening. A Final Resistance pattern might
thus emerge in the following way (taking unstressed vowel reduction to be the operative
neutralization pattern. See chapter 2 for background).
The first stage in the development of a gradient vowel reduction process yields a
system like that of Bulgarian: unstressed vowels are realized with short durations. The
degree to which reduction takes place is a function of vowel duration. Assuming a robust-
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