Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

final vowel deletion, as can be seen in the Austronesian languages discussed in Blevins
(1997) and Blevins and Garrett (1999).
Final vowel devoicing is generally assumed to have its phonetic roots in the steep
drop in subglottal pressure associated in most languages with the ends of phrases or
utterances along with final lowering of F0 (Dauer 1980, Gordon 1998). This decreased
subglottal pressure can result (particularly with a close supralaryngeal constriction
downstream) in the elimination of the pressure drop across the glottis necessary for
voicing to be maintained. In this original form we may conceive of it as a form of passive
devoicing (as discussed in e.g. Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996: 49), in which devoicing
occurs as a consequence of some other phonetic process, rather than as a result of the
planned implementation of, e.g. glottal abduction.
Gordon (1998) presents a crosslinguistic survey of vowel devoicing in both
internal and final positions, in which he makes a number of generalizations of relevance
to this discussion. The first is that in nearly all cases the presence in a language of word-
internal vowel devoicing implies the presence of final vowel devoicing, though the
opposite is not true. Gordon cites four apparent exceptions to this generalization, noting
that in three of them (Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Montreal French) stress is fixed on the
final syllable 86 . We will return to the topic of the devoicing of stressed vowels later in this
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Stressed vowels rarely devoice crosslinguistically, presumably due to the various language-specific
combinations of increases in F0, amplitude, or duration associated with stressed vowels. It should be noted
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