Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

low mid vowels to become unpredictable, and hence contrastive. Clearly though, the
different outputs of the monophthongization must be the result of different phonetic
characteristics, most likely duration, of the syllables in question. Other accounts of stress
in Gujarati suggest a source for that additional duration in initial syllables: Pandit (1958),
for example, reports that all syllables have “even stress”, except for those which are
postjunctural. Initial syllables after juncture carry a stronger stress than others (Pandit
1958: 216). It is unclear whether this should be understood to imply a phrase-initial stress
(as in Bengali), or the type of initial strengthening described below for Turkish. Clearly,
however, additional duration in the initial syllable can be implicated in the
phonologization of both licensing asymmetries. Dave (1967: 2) in fact claims that
murmured vowels are only possible in stressed syllables, but does not elaborate in that
particular study. The precise phonetic characteristics of the domain-initial syllable in
Gujarati and the status of these with respect to accentuation awaits experimental
verification.
In any case, the problem with all the above licensing patterns is clear enough: If
we are attempting to distinguish the set of phonological licensing asymmetries found in
initial syllables from the set of those found in unstressed syllables, we can gain no insight
by enumerating as exemplars of a particular initial-syllable strength pattern languages in
which the word-initial syllable is also always the stressed syllable as well. This confound
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