Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

(known as ‘akanje’, ‘[a]-saying’, in the Slavic literature), is actually of more ancient
provenance, being not a reduction of unstressed vowels at all, but rather a failure of the
contrast between /a/ and /o/ ever to emerge outside stressed syllables. Stressed [a] and [o]
in the relevant dialects are ultimately derived from Late Common Slavic long /a:/ and
short /a/ respectively. The rephonologization of this earlier quantity distinction as one of
quality took place at a period in which similar changes were affecting the rest of the
vowel system as well, essentially the breakdown of the Common Slavic prosodic system.
While in most areas the split of the long and short low vowels took place in all syllables,
irrespective of the placement of stress, it has been argued, most famously no doubt by
Shevelov (1964), that in the relevant dialects of East Slavic the split occurred only under
stress, while in unstressed syllables the quantity difference collapsed to yield a single [a]-
like vowel of one or another degree of reduction 18 .
Whatever the case diachronically, however, the synchronic status of the system as
one of categorical UVR eliminating contrastive mid vowels from unstressed syllables is
18 Crosswhite (2001) presents a similar account of the mergers of the tense and lax mid vowels in Italian
(which if true would hold for all other Romance languages with this distinction, such as Brazilian
Portuguese). The distinction between tense and lax mid vowels appears to have been neutralized already in
Vulgar Latin, as they fail to show distinct reflexes in any daughter languages (Hall 1976). Whether this
merger took place before or after the relevant contrasts shifted from being quantity-based to quality-based
(/e, o/ vs. /, / instead of /e:, o:/ vs. /e, o/) is not entirely clear. This shift must have been underway by the
time some of the early inscriptions at Pompeii, in which we find attested the merger of [] (