Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

phonology, and especially Optimality Theory) is simply unwarranted. It burdens the
phonological grammar unnecessarily with the machinery needed to derive phonetically-
grounded typological regularities, while failing to account for those regularities as
accurately as an approach appealing to the phonetics itself.
There is still, of course, a long way to go to the complete resolution of these
issues. In addition to the search for evidence of phonetic content in phonology in the
behavior of individual speakers, more typological investigation may serve to further
elucidate the issues at hand. Smith (2002) treats licensing asymmetries between roots and
affixes, arguing that these are a result of the psycholinguistic status of the former. Here I
think this argument is quite plausible. A competing hypothesis, though, might seek to
derive such asymmetries from processes of phonetic weakening visited on affixal
material as it suffers prosodic demotion to form a single prosodic word with the root 135 .
Typological surveys may serve to disambiguate further. Other potential loci for the
phonologization of positional neutralization patterns, such as closed and open syllables,
could also provide further empirical tests for the phonologization approach.
The success of the phonologization model in using phonetics to account for
typological regularities in phonological patterns suggests the possibility that a synchronic
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Here again it is conceivable that phonetic weakening is the result of the psycholinguistic status of the
entity in question. Still, it is the phonetic patterns which would be responsible for the shape of the resulting
patterns of PN. The role of psycholinguistic factors is indirect.
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