Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

inadequate durations are often phonologically unstressed is on Steriade’s view irrelevant.
This is the point of greatest contrast with the Pure Prominence approach to PN. If it turns
out that not only stressed vowels but, for example, phrase-final vowels as well have
enough duration to license mid vowels in some languages, then Steriade’s approach is
doubly vindicated, in that it avoids the disjunctive specification of environment which
would otherwise be necessary in the phonetics-free models described above.
1.1.3. Integrated Phonetics and Phonology
The integrated models of phonetics and phonology of Flemming (passim) and
Kirchner (e.g. 1998) share this goal of deriving phonological patterns of neutralization
directly from phonetic factors, though are not committed specifically to perceptual cues
as the basis of all licensing statements. In these models the boundary between phonetics
and phonology is erased entirely, allowing any phonological process to refer directly to
an unlimited array of phonetic information, whether acoustic or articulatory in nature.
Flemming (2001), for example, derives patterns of vowel reduction from the decreased
duration of unstressed syllables resulting in an unacceptable amount of effort necessary to
reach articulatory targets for the production of non-high vowels. This class of approaches
shares with the Licensing-by-Cue model the ability to achieve improved accuracy of
typological prediction in comparison with the pure prominence models detailed above,
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