Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

will treat as the alteration or addition of phonetic targets to existing phonological
representations.
In this study I advance the view that typological regularities involving the content
of phonological patterns such as positional neutralization are best accounted for through
an understanding of the phonologization process by means of which those patterns arise
from their phonetic antecedents. I also argue that both the phonologization process and
the synchronic implementation of the phonetic and phonological patterns at either end of
that process are best understood in a split model of phonetics/phonology such as that
described above.
1.5. Organization
The rest of this study is organized as follows: Chapter 2 presents the results of a
survey of licensing asymmetries found between stressed and unstressed syllables. These
effects are well-known in the literature as unstressed vowel reduction (UVR). The
typological profile of UVR is quite unambiguous. In virtually all cases neutralization of
contrasts occurs along the dimension of vowel height. While other features, such as
frontness/backness or rounding are often involved as well, cases in which a system of
unstressed vowel reduction is unambiguously based on the neutralization of palatality,
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