Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

question of phonological neutralization and categorical merger the authors say directly,
evaluating their results (in the context of an earlier study by Lehiste and Popov): “Lehiste
and Popov summarize the vowel spectra as means, which gives the impression that vowel
reduction in Bulgarian is discrete (Though the means of Lehiste and Popov also reflect
almost no reduction of /e/ - JB). But the raw data recorded in Figs 1-4 indicate that
reduction is gradual” (Wood and Pettersson 1988: 251). Also on pages 258-259: “The
two informants were typical of the reported tendency in their dialect not to reduce
unstressed /e/ as much as /a, o/. One informant tended to be more formal when reading
isolated words. ... Reduction was gradual rather than discrete, suggesting that an
underlying articulatory plan for a complete rendering is executed with varying degrees of
attention, depending on which components are neutralized and how far”. This is all fairly
unambiguous.
So vowel reduction in Bulgarian, except in its eastern dialects (specifically the
Balkan dialects, so-called, meaning the mountains, not the peninsula), is not neutralizing.
It is gradient and apparently rate-dependent. Intriguingly, Tilkov (1982: 46),
characterizing the likelihood and degree of application of this reduction in the standard
language, states that unstressed vowels reduce the least in the first pretonic syllable (what
he calls the first degree of reduction) and more so in non-first pretonic syllables and
posttonic syllables. This is the same phonetic trend as is found in East Slavic and
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