Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Another study, in fact, that of Vassiere (1988), finds the opposite pattern for
strength of velic closure in phrase-final position. It should be noted, however, that while
Keating et al. (1999) interpret this study as showing that phrase-final position is “strong”
for velum height, what the study is actually measuring may be somewhat more
ambiguous: the claim in Vassiere (1988) is that an oral consonant before a major
syntactic boundary undergoes less anticipatory velum lowering from a following VN
sequence (in other words, in a -C##VN- string) than it does in CVN strings not
interrupted by a major syntactic boundary. The claim, then, is that there is less
coproduction involving the velum across such a boundary, rather than that, all things
being equal, oral consonants have a higher velum position than they do, e.g. in phrase-
medial word-final position. The phonetic evidence is thus somewhat equivocal on phrase-
final nasalization as a natural articulatory trend, with a need for further experimental
studies to show whether or not such a thing truly exists.
The case for final nasalization as a weakening process in Sanskrit itself is also not
a particularly strong one. Wackernagel (1895) is not overly specific as to the conditions
of phrase-final nasalization of vowels, but a study by Lubotsky examines all such forms
in the Rgveda (Lubotsky 1993). The first and most obvious generalization is that such
examples are quite few in number and pattern in no exceptionless fashion. Over the years
scholars have explained it, in fact, as an editorial scheme to avoid certain confusions
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