Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

for some speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, or 3. The author of the description has noticed
word-final reduction phrase-internally and failed to notice or point out failure to reduce
phrase- or utterance-finally. This is especially likely in the gradient reduction cases like
Nanai above. Neither of the latter two hypotheses will be simple to confirm without an
extended research program.
The first hypothesis above, of course, is quite plausible, given the extremely small
number of detailed articulatory studies of phrase-final effects and the near total
concentration of these on one or two West Germanic languages. It may well be that final
lengthening, however, universal in its existence, nonetheless varies not only in its domain
and degree of application crosslinguistically, but in its articulatory implementation as
well. Certainly some languages, such as Creek (Johnson and Martin 2001) discussed
above, have final lengthening that does not impede normal phonetic vowel reduction. The
presence of articulatory strengthening in the implementation of final lengthening may
then be a variable set differently from language to language. Of course, to account for
reports of degrees of reduction targeting specifically phrase-final syllables, we would
have to assume as well that in some languages lengthening (gestural slowing) is
implemented with actual gestural weakening, rather than mere absence of strengthening.
This is of course also possible, and without further articulatory studies it may be
impossible to resolve this question satisfactorily. Certainly if the question is "Do some
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