Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

formants to approach and enhance one another in each of the corner vowels (Stevens
1986), increasing their perceptual salience. Because of this perceptual salience, the
vowels most favored by contrast-enhancing UVR will be peripheral [i, u, a] 20 .
Crosswhite formalizes these observations in OT using Licensing constraints à la
Steriade, formulated as follows:
(5) LIC-Q/β: The vowel quality Q is only licensed in context β.
Where Q = any vowel quality or a natural vowel class
β = any context that enhances the perception of Q
In the case of UVR, a typical contrast-enhancing constraint is (6):
(6) LIC-Noncorner/Stress:Noncorner vowels are licensed only under stress.
The effect of this constraint is to ban the realization of mid vowels categorically from
unstressed syllables in a manner quite like that illustrated in chapter one for Positional
Markedness constraints. An example of a system produced by the interaction of this
constraint with general Faithfulness constraints on the relevant features is Belorussian. As
described above, Belorussian contrasts five vowels /i, e, a, o, u/ under stress, but in
unstressed syllables, /e, o/ lower and merge with /a/, yielding [a]. Another example
Crosswhite cites of contrast-enhancing UVR comes from Standard Italian, in which a
20
Varying rankings of potential Licensing constraints with Faithfulness constraints will see that this is not
always the system contrast-enhancing UVR ultimately generates. Different outputs depend on languagespecific
constraint rankings.
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