A contrastive hierarchical account of positional neutralization

Abstract

In this paper, I propose that positional neutralization processes operate by deleting contrastive features from the bottom of language-specific contrastive hierarchies, rather than by restricting certain positions to one of the members of a neutralized opposition. This means that non-terminal nodes of the contrastive feature tree are licit lexical representations, and can be thought of as a principled implementation of the Prague School archiphoneme. I argue that such an analysis is preferable on conceptual grounds because the removal of a contrastive feature in a given position does not imply that the neutralized contrast is available in that position. I demonstrate that this has several empirical consequences: first, the intermediate realization of neutralized segments is expected because the deletion of a contrastive feature removes the phonetic boundary between the two segments that it distinguishes, and second, the set of available neutralizations in a single language is restricted by the set of possible configurations of features allowed within the contrastive hierarchical approach. Finally, I show how this model predicts limited (but attested) ternary feature contrasts, which arise when underlying non-terminal nodes are phonetically implemented.

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