Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

UVR, the two opposing sets of vowels, stressed and unstressed, are by definition in
complementary distribution. Long and short vowels in, e.g., Slovene, are a different
matter. They may both occur in stressed and unstressed syllables, and because of the
potential for paradigmatic contrast of this sort (unavailable in UVR systems), they may
exert pressure on one another in the manner that high vowels and mid vowels of the same
quantity may also, potentially occasioning chain shifts and the like. That such a merger
should take place in the short vowel inventory of Slovene dialects is interesting 11 , and the
fact that similar mergers seem absent from UVR systems points out a potential difference
in the relationship between long and short and stressed and unstressed vowel inventories,
but this is just one of many differences we do not yet fully understand (see Steriade 1994:
14 and 22 for some notes here) in the development of these systems.
One clear difference here is that long vowel inventories are routinely both larger
and smaller than short vowel inventories, while in UVR systems stressed inventories are
rarely if ever smaller than unstressed. Languages with contradictory patterns from this
point of view listed in Maddieson (1984) include Telefol (long /i, , a, , u/, short /i, a,
u/) and Chipewyan (long /i:, a:, u:/, short /i, e, a, o, u/. Obviously in each instance
radically different factors may have contributed to the development of the systems in
11 Doubly so in fact for this being the second occurrence of this sound change in the history of the language,
the first instance being in common with Serbo-Croatian the merger of the overshort Late Common Slavic
Jer vowels (originally short /i/ and /u/), yielding Slovenian // and SCr. /a/.
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