Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

potentially arising in hiatus contexts. It has also been deemed a “Prakritism”, apparently
being a more common phenomenon there and in Pali (p. 197-198). That said, Vedic final
nasalization does appear in one particular context more than any other: It affects only /a/,
and then most often unaccented /a/ at the end of odd numbered padas (a metrical unit
corresponding more or less to a line of verse) before accented vowels (most often /e/ or
/o/, also before syllabic /r/). There are other cases as well, though Lubotsky considers the
original case to be of an unaccented /a/ nasalizing in hiatus across a metrical boundary
before a rising accent on the following vowel. He considers it a consequence of the
lengthening of this final vowel he believes would have occurred due to an anticipatory
pitch rise before the accented vowel (p. 206). One other context for nasalization of /a/,
interestingly, is in the so-called pluti forms. These are forms with lengthened final vowels
used in certain interrogative and vocative contexts, which Lubotsky notes is thought to be
a rising intonational contour. Whatever the case ultimately here, it seems clear that
lengthening is involved, and in the case of the pluti perhaps even some emphatic element.
Whether we can truly speak of “weakening” in this case is simply not clear.
One thing that is interesting about the Sanskrit example, however, is that it affects
only /a/. This is also the case in some of the examples below. Now, it is a well-known
crosslinguistic generalization that velum height tends to vary directly with vowel height,
to the extend that low vowels are often actually produced with a substantial degree of
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