Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

like Sosva Mansi. But while systems of this sort may be disadvantaged in evolutionary
terms, for the Mansi, presumably, they are acceptable enough.
Something similar to the Sosva Mansi system occurs in some dialects of Khanty,
such as Tromagan (Abondolo 1998). Additionally, in most Khanty dialects (as noted by
Steriade 1994), no round vowels occur outside initial syllables, and vowel harmony has
been lost, creating a system in which UVR neutralizes specifically round contrasts,
another rare configuration 10 . The Proto-Ob-Ugrian vowel inventory for non-initial
syllables contained front and back harmonic variants of ii, aa, and (Honti 1988: 331).
Proto-Uralic, in fact, is reconstructed with palatal harmony affecting non-initial-syllable
vowels of only two heights, written as *[i, , ä, å] (Sammallahti 1988: 481). Discounting
the harmonization, this system is identical to the two vowel system attested in cases of
UVR such as the pretonic syllables of Bari Italian (given as [, a] by Loporcaro), in
which remaining front/back contrasts are neutralized while a single height contrast
remains (the next step being the reduction of that last height contrast, yielding schwa).
The lack of round vowels in Khanty non-initial syllables is thus a continuation from this
earlier state, one which is both attested and expected in the typology of UVR systems. It
10 Proto-Ob-Ugrian, like Proto-Uralic, is reconstructed with fixed initial stress (Sammallahti 1988). Khanty,
however, appears to have at least some instances of stress attraction heavy peninitial syllables in an
otherwise fixed initial system (Honti 1988). This may mean that synchronically harmony-free dialects of
Khanty should not be considered systems of UVR, though at the relevant historical period at least they may
have been.
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