NEUTRALIZATION . ? ! The phonetics – phonology issue in the analysis of word-f inal obstruent voic ing

In German and Polish, the voicing contrast in obstruents is excluded from word-final position. Prague Circle phonology treated this as phonological neutralization with phonetic voiceless exponency. Generative Phonology created underlying phonological contrasts, which experimental phoneticians started testing for phonetic substantiation at the surface level. Laboratory Phonology has adopted this paradigm and continues to maintain that neutralization is incomplete in spite of differences being too small for communicative relevance. The debate can be terminated by substituting a polysystemic syntagmatic approach for the monosystemic paradigmatic one. 1. From the Archiphoneme to Incomplete Neutral izat ion In a fair number of languages, the voicing distinction in obstruents is limited to certain positions. In Polish, the domain of these limitations is the phrase, across morpheme and word boundaries: all final obstruents are voiceless before pause, and internal obstruent clusters are either all voiceless or all voiced depending on the voicing feature of the last obstruent [1]. In German, the domain is the word: all obstruents are voiceless in final position (also morpheme-final before consonant, e.g. möglich /k/ vs. hüg(e)lig /g/) [2]. These phonotactic restrictions were conceptualized in Prague Circle phonology as neutralization of a phonological opposition to an archiphoneme, which incorporates all the features that the elements of the neutralized pair have in common, and thus does not coincide with either of them, but which is represented phonetically by one or the other [3]. In the cases quoted, it is the voiceless obstruent in German, the voiceless or the voiced one in Polish. For alternations between archiphoneme and voiced or voiceless obstruent in morphological paradigms, as between German Bund [t] – Bunde, Bünde [d], bunt [t] – bunte [t], Prague Circle linguistics, just like American Structuralism, set up a morphophonological level, separate from phonology in the narrow sense. This conception of levels of linguistic description changed with the advent of Generative Grammar, which denied systemic phonology an independent status and integrated phonological correspondences in morphological paradigms in the phonological component of a grammar. Phonological alternations were represented by the same contrast of underlying distinctive feature bundles across all positions, from which the neutralized form was derived by phonetic rule, e.g. word-final devocing of /d/ in Bund [t]. Thus neutralization was treated as a phonetic process operating on a phonological distinction. So, when researchers started taking these new phonological solutions into the laboratory, it was a natural consequence for them to ask whether the postulated non-neutralization in phonology was also supported by a phonetic contrast, which had not been detected previously due to missing measurements. The first to raise this incomplete neutralization issue for German were Mitleb [4], Port et al. [5], O'Dell and Port [6], followed by more extensive accounts and discussions in Port and O'Dell [7]. These researchers stood in the Haskins Labs tradition of analysing the voiced/voiceless contrast in English word-final plosives with reference to the durations of the preconsonantal vowel, the closure and closure voicing, and the release, which they applied to German words. Consistent differences were found, especially in the duration of the vowel, in citation form pronunciation. They were small (15 ms of vowel and burst durations, 5 ms of closure voicing on average), but in the same direction as in the nonneutralizing word-medial context, i.e., longer vowel, shorter burst, and more closure voicing in the underlying voiced plosive, some of them reaching statistical significance. The production data were supplemented by listener judgments, which identified the produced member of a pair poorly, but significantly better than chance (59% overall). The authors concluded from these results, supported by inferential statistics, that German had incomplete neutralization of the underlying word-final voicing opposition in obstruents, and that these phonetic differences would have to be taken into account in the phonology of German by the introduction of implementation rules of the generally maintained phonological contrast. Fourakis and Iverson [8] argued convincingly, on the basis of data from orthographic vs. free elicitation of relevant words, that the phonetic differences were caused by hypercorrection of isolated words in a reading task, and that there were no grounds for postulating incomplete neutralization in the phonology of German. They also pointed out that weg (although etymologically related to the noun paradigm Weg : Wege) was not part of a morphological alternation at all, now being an adverb with a short vowel. Another crucial point in the evaluation of these data is that the authors found it necessary to explain the meanings of some of their words to their subjects before the actual tests, viz. Alb 'elf' vs. Alp 'mountain pasture', schrag (imperative form of obsolete schragen) 'join wooden poles cross-wise or slanting' vs. schrak (past tense of intransitive schrecken, which only occurs in erschrecken) 'had a fright', Weck 'breakfast roll' (southern dialect word). In view of the complete lack of context for words, which in addition are not all part of the subjects' common vocabulary or are unusual morphological forms, the test items assumed the status of logatomes. Furthermore, the data were collected in the US from German speakers who had spent considerable lengths of time in an English-speaking environment and had no doubt been made aware of the need to differentiate final orthographic <b>, <d>, <g> from <p>, < t>, <k>. In view of these flaws in experimental design, these data were not able to substantiate the claim of incomplete neutralization. But the discussion has continued ever since. Slowiaczek and Dinnsen [9] applied the same phonological paradigm with the same experimental design flaws to neutralization in Polish, and obtained the same type of small differences. On the basis of such phonetic measurements in underlying phonological distinctions, Dinnsen [10,11] finally concluded that careful phonetic studies would reveal that all declared neutralization rules in the phonologies of languages were in effect not neutralizing at all. Not only did he accept the validity of the phonetic data without query, he also put forward theoretical phonological arguments to counteract the objection that the acoustic production differences are too small to be perceived. As in generative phonology grammars are assumed to be abstract representations, neutral with respect to speaker and hearer, the existence of distinctions in production but of neutralization in perception would entail a different theoretical conceptualization. The speaker-hearer indifference would vanish, neutralization would become part of phonological perception, and production differences would be linguistically irrelevant. This would have “awkward consequences” for allophonic rules, which “describe production differences [that] are not generally self-discriminable by native listeners” So, if “phonological rules specify segments differently only if their production differences are perceptually salient, phonological descriptions would exclude all allophonic statements” [11, pp. 271f]. There are two flaws in this line of argument. First of all, it mixes up non-discriminability on the basis of an acoustic distinction being below the Just Noticeable Difference [JND] of the perception mechanism, and nondiscriminability of contextual variation in category allocation experiments. Naïve listeners in most English varieties may not be able to “hear” the difference they make between clear and dark /l/ initially and finally in English little, when asked about the presence of a sound distinction, but they will immediately recognise the absence of the right /l/ in final position and categorize it as ‘foreign’ or ‘Irish’. The lack of perceptual relevance of acoustic measurements in the incomplete neutralization issue, however, has to do with the JND threshold. The second flaw concerns the conception of a language as an abstract system indifferent as to speaker and hearer, and thus dissociated from speech communication, but nevertheless buttressed with reference to speaker data obtained in problematic experimental lab speech designs. 2. Refut ing Incomplete Neutra l izat ion in Pol ish Jassem and Richter [1] replied to [9] with an experimental analysis that removed the flaws of previous data acquisition and placed phonological description in a framework of speech communication rather than on a level of abstract linguistics. The findings of [9] were reexamined with materials that were to meet the following conditions: • speakers are recruited within their native-language country • speakers do not see the materials in orthographic form • materials are not of a metalinguistic type but consist of unprepared utterances elicited in a natural dialogue situation. • speakers represent a homogeneous group with regard to dialectal variation. The results show a slight tendency of mean durations of vowels towards greater, and of consonants and consonant releases towards smaller, values for +voice. The differences are extremely small and not always regular (4 ms for vowel and for consonant durations), and none of the differences reach statistical significance. In a subsequent listening test, subjects indicated a strong bias for phonetic voicelessness corresponding to underlying –voice as well as +voice in final neutralizing position. So the conclusion is that “data obtained from materials recorded under conditions approaching a spontaneous discourse situation give no ground for rejecting the traditional view that in positions of phrase-final devoicing and internal assimilation, neutralization of the voice feature in Polis