Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

as the durational asymmetries in question would be too small to produce the articulatory
pressures which lead to patterns of this sort.
In each case - stressed, final, and initial syllable positions - the phonologization
model was shown to account better for the full range of typological regularities in PN
systems than competing approaches. I have argued that since attested typologies fall out
naturally from the phonologization of phonetic patterns in diachrony, there is little reason
to imagine that the phonology needs to cover this same ground again, “justifying” within
the competence of the individual speaker the functionalist wholesomeness of
phonological patterns which are already in essence a fait accompli for the language. If it
is necessary at all that the phonology place restrictions on the phonetic content of the
patterns it implements, it should be possible to show that there is some aspect of these
patterns which cannot be accounted for through phonologization. We should not simply
assume a priori that the phonological grammar contains such information because it is
possible to model it in such a way. It must be clear additionally that it is necessary for us
to do so.
The central problem here is the aprioristic assumption that the phonological
grammar must be capable both of implementing the phonological patterns of any given
human language and accounting restrictively and exhaustively for the range of variation
in those patterns crosslinguistically. This assumption (though prevalent in generative
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