Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Chapter 2. Stressed syllables and unstressed vowel reduction
This chapter is an examination of the licensing asymmetries attested
crosslinguistically between stressed and unstressed syllables. Unstressed vowel reduction
(hereafter UVR), the topic of inquiry for most of this chapter, is perhaps the best known
of the licensing asymmetries to be treated in this dissertation. Section 2.1 presents an
overview of the typology of unstressed vowel reduction, identifying the main patterns a
theory of vowel reduction must be able to account for. Specifically, it is shown that the
overwhelming majority of UVR patterns are based on the elimination of height contrasts
from unstressed syllables. Nasalization and quantity contrasts can also be involved.
Systems based on the elimination of other contrasts, however, such as palatality,
roundness, and ATR/RTR/Pharyngealization, features commonly operative in systems of
vowel harmony, appear never to arise. Section 2.2 introduces the primary phonetic
tendencies which give rise to vowel reduction patterns and shows how the
phonologization model uses these to account straightforwardly for the typological
patterns identified here.
Most treatments of vowel reduction make a strict division between “phonological
vowel reduction”, the neutralization of phonological contrasts outside of stressed
syllables, and “phonetic vowel reduction”, usually held to be a less dramatic process of
centralization or raising of non-high vowels as a result of articulatory undershoot of the
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