Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

surveyed above, it is precisely this phonetic information which should interest us. The
phonologization approach to typology makes the relationship between the phonetic
pattern of initial strengthening and initial-syllable phonological licensing effects,
however hazy in synchrony, both central and clear to our accounting. As in other cases,
the gradient phonetic process, despite its variability and stronger implementation in
higher prosodic domains nonetheless creates sufficient individual strengthened tokens of
the forms in question to bring about the ultimate phonologization of that strength, be it as
resistance to neutralizations operating internally, or as neutralization along the lines of
Positional Augmentation. In this sense the initial syllable is no different from the stressed
syllable. Both positions undergo phonetic strengthening. What is different, however, is
the nature of the phonetic strengthening involved. Phonetic initial strengthening targets
primarily the first segment of the word or phrase, thus making it perfectly clear why both
Positional Augmentation and Positional Strength processes should single out onset
consonants.
It also explains the increased duration of the absolute word-initial vowels which
leads to phonological effects never observed on initial-syllable vowels following onset
consonants. Some evidence for such durational increase was presented in Chapter 2;
recall that Balasubramanian 1981 demonstrates this longer duration experimentally for
Tamil, the same duration was implicated in the resistance of absolute initial /a/ to
296