Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

elated to that position phonologically in any language. For the case of laryngeal
neutralization cited above, the relevant constraints would simply combine the relevant
feature (e.g. [+constricted glottis]) with the relevant position (here, coda) in either a
faithfulness or a markedness constraint to generate the desired neutralization pattern. It is
not clear in these approaches what we should make of the fact that the grammar would be
just as happy formally with the same constraint with “unstressed syllable” substituted for
“coda”, both being weak positions.
For better or worse, then, there is a fairly obvious way in which this approach is
missing certain generalizations. Specifically, it is manifestly not the case that all features
are equally relevant or active phonologically in all positions. For example, languages do
not typically ban all laryngeal contrasts are typically not banned from all and only
positions within the stressed syllable, and a theory which allows for the simple expression
of any number of such unattested and phonetically-unexpected systems is simply
deficient in its ability to account for the crosslinguistic regularities attested in the
typology of positional neutralization patterns.
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