Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Another possibility is that devoicing of unstressed final vowels is partial, as it is
with stressed vowels, only due to the lower subglottal pressure we can assume is present
in unstressed finals, the devoicing does not have the turbulence to be considered
“aspiration”, and in this way perhaps escaped description. But if this is the case, there is
an obvious problem, viz. why is utterance-final devoicing realized more robustly (or even
at all) on a syllable with high enough subglottal pressure to give the impression of
frication when it applies, given that the putative phonetic root of phrase-final devoicing is
actually dramatically lowered subglottal pressure? And why at the same time are the final
syllables in this language that might actually realize this lower subglottal pressure
(unstressed finals) being realized with devoicing of a far less salient degree?
The answer must lie in phonologization. Specifically, if devoicing has ceased to
be an automatic consequence of its phonetic surroundings (i.e. has been phonologized),
such that the target pronunciation of utterance-final syllables includes partial devoicing of
the final vowel (i.e. is phonetically specified to include devoicing), then all utterance-
final vowels, regardless of the degree of subglottal pressure associated with any given
token, will be realized with some amount of devoicing. Furthermore, and perhaps most
importantly, the implementation of that planned devoicing would now potentially vary
according to its phonetic environment, meaning that in syllables with increased subglottal
pressure it would be realized with greater turbulence and hence be perceptually more
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