Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

eason to favor the one strategy over the other (in fact, if the information-bearing status of
the contrasts in question should be a factor as to which neutralization would be more
detrimental to lexical access, the consonantal effects might well be disfavored, rather than
attested to the exclusion of anything else). Implementation of both might conceivably
neutralize too many contrasts for the system to bear, though then we need a metric for
evaluation of licit numbers of neutralizations in a given system, rather than merely
guidelines as to which types are permitted and which are not. For that matter, since it is
argued also that a bimoraic vowel increases the perceptual prominence of a stressed
syllable, and also that in some systems (such as English) the prominence of the stressed
syllable is used to facilitate the segmentation of speech, it is not clear why, in a language
without duration-cued stress, all initial-syllables should not be required to be bimoraic.
Such a neutralization would contribute enormously to the perceptual prominence of the
initial syllable, and hence to the demarcation of the word boundary, while presumably not
detracting nearly as much from word recognition as the neutralization of multiple
consonantal contrasts would. And yet such a thing seems to be utterly unattested in the
languages of the world. Smith’s formulation of the Segmental Contrast Condition defines
legitimate exceptions to bans on neutralizations in psycholinguistically-strong positions
as those in which the satisfaction of the Positional Augmentation constraint “serves to
demarcate the left edge of σ 1” (Smith 2002: 296), which perhaps implies a priori
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