Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

and/or amplitude-cued 128 , then the assumption of Proto-Turkic carryover coarticulation
would acquire a certain phonetic naturalness (again, as per Majors 1999). The idea of a
subsequent shift to stronger anticipatory coarticulation, however, in the face of the
uninterrupted phonetic prominence of the initial syllable, now becomes difficult to
countenance 129 . Certainly the innovation of the F0-cued accent of later Turkic is a poor
candidate for the driving force behind that change. A shift in the direction of vowel-to-
vowel coarticulation in these circumstances seems capricious and unmotivated. On the
other hand, if the earlier fixed initial stress had prosodic characteristics similar to those of
the stress in Modern Turkish, then even the motivation for assuming an earlier carryover
coarticulation in the first place becomes obscure.
The preferable option, of course, would be to produce an analysis that could save
the coarticulation theory without recourse to the historical assumptions discussed above.
To this end I propose the following: Anticipatory coarticulation, all things being equal,
may well be stronger than carryover in Modern Turkish, and lacking any reason to
assume otherwise, I take this to have been the case in Proto-Turkic as well. As
128 The alternative potential source for the modern initial syllable vowel-lengthening mentioned in note 4
above. The relationship between amplitude and stress in Modern Turkish is not straightforward, though
there may be a correlation to some extent for non-final stresses (Konrot 1981). Numerous confounding
factors in Konrot’s experiment make this difficult to ascertain. As noted before, duration is not correlated
with stress at all.
129 Even assuming that only later did stress and coarticulation become dissociated, as they are today in
Turkish.
334