Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

ending up generally as short could be seen as the result of a hypercorrective change,
whereby the listener, hearing additional length in final position, attributes that length to
the final lengthening (wrongly, in the case of underlying long vowels) and factors it out
in his or her interpretation of the speaker's intentions, reconstructing a final short vowel
in all cases.
That more must be involved in the tendency to avoid a long/short contrast in final
position than merely phonetic lengthening becomes clear when we compare potential
fates for quantity contrasts here with those found in stressed syllables, as discussed in 2.1.
As noted, some languages collapse quantity contrasts in stressed syllables through
lengthening of short vowels. This durational enhancement, however, invariably results in
neutralization to a long vowel. This is of course unsurprising given the phonetic
processes commonly associated with stressed syllables, the phonologization of which
often results in grammars requiring stressed syllables to be bimoraic, or to avoid low
sonority vowels like [] or [] (which latter also occurs in final syllables - see below). In
short, there is nothing about stressed syllables per se which would ever make them bad
positions in which to realize a long duration vowel. If anything, the additional duration is
beneficial, serving to enhance the contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables.
There are also languages, however, in which only the stressed syllable licenses the
contrast between long and short vowels. The implication here is that while unstressed
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