Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

intrinsic becoming extrinsic, such that automatic contextual variation is reinterpreted as
intentional on the part of the speaker. Hyman distinguishes two distinct processes, the
first of which he calls phonologization, and the second phonemicization. His example is
consonantally-conditioned tone split, whereby naturally occurring perturbations of F0
after voiced and voiceless obstruents are reinterpreted as intentional, such that speakers
begin to use tone contours as cues to voicing, exaggerating the range of the perturbations
in the process such that they can no longer be attributed to universals of phonetic
implementation. In Keating’s terms, however, this is the development of language-
specific phonetic patterns. According to the model laid out above, while the exaggerated
F0 perturbations are clearly intentional (targeted), there is still no reason to believe that
they are phonological (meaning themselves encoded as distinct phonological categories.
That they function as cues to the distinction between other phonological categories is
clear enough). Hyman’s next stage, phonemicization, comes when the distinction
between the voiced and voiceless consonants which originally conditioned the pitch
differences is lost, yielding a contrast between segmentally identical strings differing only
in their tonal contours. I will use the term phonologization throughout to mean
specifically the innovation of changes to phonological representations, whether these
result in the neutralization of contrasts or not. Hyman’s first stage of phonologization I
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