Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

with non-modal phonation or devoicing toward the end. They have thus also come, as it
was with stressed syllables, to be so similar that the contrast between them is in danger of
collapse. But here there is a problem. If word-internal long vowels are, say, also 200 ms
long, but with steady amplitude and no devoicing or the like, and the listener ordinarily
factors out or corrects for some additional duration in phrase-final position as the result of
domain-final lengthening, final vowels would sound less like true long vowels (which
should be long and steady), and more like short vowels that had some duration added to
mark the phrase boundary, but which nonetheless sound weaker in some respects than a
real long vowel ought to. The full complexity of the typological picture is thus only
comprehensible when the full range of phonetic effects characteristic of final position is
taken into consideration.
While Buckley's notion of a general tendency to avoid length in final syllables
owing to the phonetic trend of phrase-final lengthening does help to explain the failure of
a variety of lengthening processes word-finally, including Iambic Lengthening, it is less
clear what we should make of the more general tendency for avoidance of final stress
crosslinguistically with or without Iambic Lengthening playing a role. For Hung this is
the effect of the constraint Rhythm, demanding an unstressed syllable following every
stressed one. A phonetic lengthening trend in final position, on the other hand, should
have the opposite effect (if any). Insofar as duration is a frequent crosslinguistic cue for
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