Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

combination of phonetic strengthening and weakening affecting different aspects of the
production of final vowels.
3.6.5.2. Final Reduction
Laxing or reduction of word- or phrase-final vowels is a commonly encountered
pattern crosslinguistically. While the laxing of high or mid vowels could be considered an
instantiation of the final lowering described above, many of these systems explicitly raise
/a/ to schwa in the same environment, precluding any such explanation. Sometimes
descriptions are not specific, as in Biyagó (Atlantic, Bissagos archipelago, Wilson 2000-
2001), where word-final vowels are said to be "somewhat lax and can be hard to
distinguish". As noted above, if final reduction is identical in both phrase-internal and
phrase-final contexts, it might be possible to attribute it to the phonologization for all
tokens of the relevant forms of the realizations previously arising only phrase-medially,
where the final was indeed short and heavily reduced. Recall the Bulgarian and Brazilian
Portuguese durational facts showing the relative weakness specifically of phrase-medial
final vowels. This would be difficult to prove, however, without fairly detailed historical
documentation of the language, and in any case, it fails to resolve all our problems in this
regard, as instances of the weakening specifically of phrase-final vowels, either
exclusively or at least to a greater degree than phrase-medial finals are in fact attested.
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