Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

positional neutralization patterns affecting all vowels in initial syllables were shown to be
few and far between in the languages of the world (in contrast to the well-attested
patterns involving initial consonants, which the phonologization model derives from the
well-attested phonetic strengthening of precisely these segments, as well as word-initial
vowels). In fact, most of the putative instances of PN involving the vowels of initial
syllables take place in languages which either have fixed initial stress today, or had fixed
initial stress at the time of the development of the patterns in question. There are a few
other cases, such as Gujarati, in which the placement of stress is less clear, but in which
the patterns of PN are clearly the result of phonologizations affected by durational
asymmetries. Remaining cases of initial-syllable vowel PN, in which there can be no
question of initial stress at any stage (such as the Benue-Congo examples and potentially
also Turkic, though the accentual facts are more ambiguous there) are remarkable in that
all show systems of vowel harmony (or derivations thereof) rather than inventory
reductions of the UVR-type. This regularity among the cases left over when initial-stress
languages are removed from the picture is unexpected in the initialness model, but I
present evidence that in certain languages small-scale durational asymmetries may arise
through the application of initial strengthening to the vowels of initial syllables. I also
present a scenario for how such an asymmetry could lead to the development of vowel
harmony, as in Proto-Turkic. UVR-like patterns would be unexpected, on the other hand,
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