Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Since the final syllable is the most unrestricted licenser in the word in Murut, it is
tempting to imagine that this perhaps owes to some particularly outstanding phonetic
prominence, a prominence which allows it to excel even the stressed syllable in licensing
capacity. This, however, would in all likelihood be incorrect.
I have no instrumental data on Timugon Murut from which to determine the
precise prosodic characteristics of the final syllable, but a diachronic approach to the
problem makes clear both the source of the current distribution of vowels in the language
and the prominence relationships which must have led to them. Two preliminary facts are
necessary to understanding the situation: First, the vowel transcribed ‘o’ in Murut (and
many related neighboring languages) is generally not realized as IPA [o]. In Timugon
Murut this vowel is [o] only before [w] (Prentice 1971: 19). The base symbol used by
Prentice in phonetic transcription, [], is also somewhat misleading, as the vowel is
realized with this quality only before velar consonants in closed syllables. The elsewhere
realization of ‘o’ in this language is apparently something more like [], what Prentice
describes as a “voiced lower-mid central half-rounded vocoid” (1971: 19). Realization of
this vowel also varies significantly among the Murutic, Dusunic, and Paitanic languages
of the area (Boutin and Pekkanen 1993). In Kimaragang (Dusunic, Kroeger 1992), it is
realized as [] under stress, while other Dusunic languages have it as “a back unrounded
or only slightly rounded vowel, roughly [], with considerable tensing of the tongue
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