Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

contrasts even among the high vowels (since original /i/ and // remain contrastive in non-
final syllables).
Tamil (Beckman 1998) presents a case in which no round vowels occur outside
the stressed initial syllable (see chapter 4 for a discussion of stress in Tamil and
Dravidian at large. Why Beckman chooses to treat Tamil as an instance of initial
prominence rather than UVR is not obvious), contrary to the generalization made here. In
the dialect Beckman treats, of the five underlying short vowels /i, e, a, o, u/, only /i, a, u/
appear contrastively outside the initial syllable (Beckman 1998: 87). Additionally, in
non-initial syllables, the three peripheral vowels receive the allophonic realizations [, ,
]. It is thus not so much the case that the system avoids round/unround contrasts in
unstressed syllables, but rather that the allophonic unrounding of short /u/ and the
predictable UVR elimination of the mid vowels conspire to produce a system in which no
round vowels appear. It is potentially relevant here too that it is short /u/ in particular
which is affected in this way. Even in the initial syllable the short peripheral vowels
undergo some qualitative phonetic reduction, being realized as [, , ] respectively.
The special vulnerability of the short high vowels in systems with long/short
contrasts deserves serious further investigation. One potential avenue of exploration
would focus on the durational characteristics of these, particularly in connection with the
well-known crosslinguistic tendency for short high vowels to be subject to devoicing.
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