Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

the speech stream (e.g. by providing cues for the presence of word boundaries). Thus, the
requirement for low-sonority word-initial onset consonants fulfills this latter goal, and
hence is allowed to neutralize, e.g., the voicing contrast for obstruents, even though doing
so is unhelpful from the point of view of word recognition. According to Smith, these are
the only contrast-neutralizing effects found in initial syllables, with the types of
Positional Augmentation phenomena affecting, for example, the vowels of stressed
syllables being conspicuously absent.
The typological regularities Smith seeks to capture for initial position using the
psycholinguistic- vs. phonetic-strength dichotomy are, to summarize, these: Word-initial
onset consonants are seen both to undergo neutralizations involving the lowering of their
sonority, and also to preferentially license more contrasts than the onsets of other
syllables within the word. For vowels, on the other hand, initial syllables frequently
license more contrasts than other positions, but no neutralizations resulting from phonetic
augmentation for the sake of perceptual prominence are seen to occur. This follows from
the classification of initial syllables as psycholinguistically, rather than phonetically
strong. If we assume with Smith (though incorrectly, as it turns out; see below) that initial
syllables are not subject to phonetic strengthening, then any licensing asymmetries
observed in initial syllables must owe their existence to something else, such as
psycholinguistic prominence. This prominence, with the restrictions on licensing
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