Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

discussed below in the context of Russian and Belorussian, only apparently far less
dramatic. Tilkov provides no quantitative demonstration of this trend, unfortunately 17 .
Seen from a dialectological perspective, of course, the different Bulgarian dialects
do represent a single whole with respect to UVR: They preserve a number of stages along
a possible progression of phonologizations of gradient phonetic patterns. In the west,
nearer to the borders with the Former Yugoslavia, dialects have little if any unstressed
vowel reduction (missing entirely in standard Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian, present to
some extent in certain dialects nearer to Bulgaria). In Sofia there is gradient phonetic
raising of /a/ and /o/, possibly with the former phonologized as a merger for some
speakers. Little or no raising of /e/, however, is attested. Variants on this situation are
found across the country (as well as pockets of interesting innovations and/or archaisms
which are beyond the scope of this study). Finally, in the eastern dialects, the phonetic
reduction of /e, a, o/ has become dramatic enough and consistent enough that it has been
phonologized, resulting in categorical phonological mergers of those vowels with /i, u, /.
17 Still though, a weak, gradient version of the East Slavic pattern present in Bulgarian, where in most
dialects (with certain exceptions in the Rhodopes) the directions of neutralization are completely different
from those of East Slavic would be a fascinating testament to the staying power of minute aspects of the
phonetic detail of a given prosodic system to survive the complete destruction and transformation of that
system and to linger in a context in which they are otherwise wholly alien and phonologically unexpected.
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