Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

2.3.2. Categorical vowel reduction: Belorussian
An example of phonologized, categorical unstressed vowel reduction comes from
Belorussian (Czekman and SmuΩkowa 1988). In Belorussian, five vowels, /i, e, a, o, u/, in
stressed syllables are reduced to three vowels, [i, a, u], in unstressed syllables.
Specifically, in unstressed syllables /e, a, o/ merge, all being realized as [a] or [],
depending on the position of the vowel relative to the stress. Crucially, in Belorussian, as
in Eastern Bulgarian, vowel reduction is neutralizing. It takes place whenever the non-
high vowels occur in an unstressed syllable, regardless of the phonetic duration of the
nucleus vowel. There is also no question of gradience. The mid vowels are simply
realized as the contextually appropriate allophones of /a/. Reduced tokens in which, for
example, /o/ is more [a]-like or more [o]-like depending on its duration are not found.
The diachronic situation in East Slavic is complex and will not be resolved
definitively here. It is possible, however, that the mergers of /e/, /o/ and /a/ never took the
route of gradual phonetic approximation to eventual phonologization of merger in the
first place. To dramatically distill the opposing points of view on the matter, one account
holds that southern East Slavic dialects lost the distinction between /a/ and /o/ in
unstressed syllables as a result of vowel reduction. Evidence of this includes the
relatively late appearance of orthographic evidence of the merger in East Slavic
documents (14 th century - Vlasto 1985: 316-317). Another view holds that this merger
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