Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

of effort necessary to reach a low vowel target in an unstressed syllable, the correct
solution is to undershoot the vowel’s openness targets (raising the non-high vowels
phonetically), such that gestural maxima are reached in a timely fashion with an
acceptable expenditure of articulatory effort.
This describes gradient vowel raising in UVR systems such as that found for
unstressed /o/ ([o]~[u]) in Bulgarian or /a/ ([a]~[]) in Russian. Formalized correctly, the
system would generate F1 values for the vowels in question as a function of the durations
allotted to those vowels in a given unstressed syllable. Where unstressed syllables were
shorter (fast speech, immediately posttonic non-final syllables) more reduction would
take place, and where durations were longer (absolute word-initial or absolute phrase-
final position) less reduction would take place.
To produce neutralization of contrasts, Flemming’s model (1999, 2001) uses the
interaction of constraints mandating the maintenance of a certain number of contrasts and
constraints demanding that there be a minimum phonetic distance between entities in
contrast. Put simply, if constraints mandating that the system retain the contrasts between
/o/ and /u/ or /e/ and /i/ outrank constraints specifying the minimum phonetic distance
along the height dimension that [o]must be from [u] or [e] must be from [i], then no
neutralization will take place, and the contrast will be maintained even in such case as the
mid vowels are raised perilously close to the high vowels. If, however, Minimum
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