Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

advice for teachers of non-standard dialect speakers on how best to get their students to
conform to that description in, for example, the system of UVR they employ in their
speech. In this connection, on the topic of causing speakers of dialects that realize [o]
faithfully in unstressed syllables 126 , to begin merging /o/ and /a/ when unstressed as
described in chapter 2, Avanesov notes that speakers of these dialects usually pass
through a number of intermediate stages of pronunciation before completely acquiring
the norm: often the first instances of /o/ reducing merge with /a/ (as [a] or []) are those
in pretonic syllables preceding a stressed [a]. Additionally, often speakers learn to reduce
nearly all unstressed /o/’s to [a], but nonetheless retain thereafter unstressed [o] in
pretonic syllables immediately preceding stressed /o/ (Avanesov 1968: 52). This
discussion, entirely in the context of the linguistic development of the individual speaker
of a completely non-/o/-reducing dialect nonetheless describes precisely the
characteristics of the two “assimilative” UVR dialects described above, dialects which,
not accidentally, are located in the borderlands between the faithfully ‘o-saying’ and the
solidly ‘a-saying’. In general this is a phenomenon worthy of serious further phonetic and
dialectological study.
So while there clearly are systems in which there is a connection between systems
of UVR and some kinds of harmonization, what we apparently never find are systems in
126 The mostly northern, so-called ‘okajushchie’ or ‘o-saying’ dialects.
331