Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

model of phonetics-phonology, together with the phonologization approach to
phonological typology, allows the same precise accounting for crosslinguistic
regularities, without forcing those patterns in synchrony to be something which they are
not.
I will take categorical unstressed vowel reduction as a test case, as a treatment of
it has already been worked out in a direct-phonetics model of the phonetics-phonology
interface (Flemming 2001). An approach deriving UVR from phonetic factors would
need to focus, as described in Chapter 2, on the relationship between the time needed to
achieve the relatively more open target articulations for the upper vocal tract
characteristic of non-high vowels and the duration allotted in UVR languages to vowels
in unstressed syllables. Phonetic UVR such as, say, raising of /a/ toward [] or mid
vowels /e, o/ toward [i, u] will can be modeled as the interaction of durational targets for
vowels in unstressed syllables and constraints mandating minimization of articulatory
effect where possible. Shortening the duration of an unstressed low vowel would increase
the amount of articulatory effort necessary to reach the low vowel’s articulatory targets in
the time allotted, since without altering either the duration of the vowel or the gestural
targets the only fix is to increase the speed of the gestures in question. Assuming lower
ranking of constraints specifying gestural targets, however, and higher ranking of both
the constraints fixing syllable durations and those forbidding expenditure of the amount
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