Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

existence of the former, and I will turn momentarily to the documentation, despite all
expectations (including my own), of the latter. I should note here, however, an important
point about the potential relationship between psycholinguistic prominence and phonetic
strengthening. Inasmuch as syntagmatic contrast enhancement involving initial onset
consonants can be said to facilitate segmentation of the speech stream, and insofar as
paradigmatic contrast enhancement affecting that same can be imagined to enhance
perceptibility of the contrasts in initial position so crucial to early-stage word recognition,
it is perfectly logical to hypothesize (though I will refrain from doing so) that these
phonetic effects themselves are derived from precisely the concerns invoked by Smith in
her characterization of the psycholinguistic status of the initial syllable. This may indeed
be so, but it in no way changes the substance of my argument here. For even if
psycholinguistic concerns of one sort or another are ultimately the raison d’être of the set
of phonetic patterns associated with domain-initial segmental material, it is still the
precise characteristics of those phonetic patterns which determine the shape and
distribution of the phonological licensing asymmetries to which they may ultimately give
rise through phonologization. Psycholinguistic status, in other words, may ultimately
explain why anything gets phonologized in initial position, but it is the phonetic patterns
alone which determine what will be phonologized where. Smith, by contrast, places the
psycholinguistic concerns discussed here directly into the phonology, as filters on the
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