Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

unstressed vowel (Crosswhite 2001: 206). Experimental evidence from Farnetani and
Kori (1990) provides an explanation for this fact, in that vowels with secondary stress are
seen not to differ significantly from unstressed vowels in duration, while the vowels of
stressed syllables are regularly longer than both.
It should be noted also, though, that while durational impoverishment is strongly
correlated with vowel reduction, it is not necessarily the case that additional duration
alone will rescue an otherwise-reducing unstressed vowel from its fate. This is the
conclusion reached by Johnson and Martin (2001) in their experimental study of phonetic
vowel reduction in Creek, where the additional duration supplied to final vowels by
phrase-final lengthening does not cause them to resist the centralization characteristic of
unstressed syllables in the language. Nord (1987) reaches similar conclusions for
Swedish. The role of final lengthening in inhibiting UVR in many languages (along with
its failure to do so in others) is treated in detail below in Chapter 3.
The phonologization approach advanced in this study derives the typological
characteristics of UVR systems from language-specific patterns of phonetic undershoot
developing in unstressed syllables under articulatory pressure cause by durational
impoverishment. We should therefore expect to find in the languages of the world
plentiful instances of patterns of phonetic vowel reduction in which vowels of different
heights come to approximate one another’s positions in the vowel space, but have yet to
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