Contrast and Neutralization
Contrast is the capacity of sounds to distinguish meaning, and neutralization is the loss of a contrast in particular environments.
Definition
The study of where phonological contrasts hold and where they are neutralized, suspended in specific positions or contexts.
Scope
This topic covers how phonological contrasts are established and how they can be suspended. It treats neutralization, in which a distinction maintained in some positions is lost in others—as with final-obstruent devoicing that removes a voicing contrast at the ends of words in some languages—and the related notion of the archiphoneme. It also addresses positional contrast, the distribution of contrasts across the word, and the difference between complete and incomplete neutralization observed in phonetic study. The treatment is descriptive and analytic.
Core questions
- What does it mean for a contrast to be neutralized?
- In what positions are contrasts commonly maintained or lost?
- What is the archiphoneme and how does it analyze neutralization?
- Is neutralization always phonetically complete?
Key theories
- Neutralization and the archiphoneme
- Trubetzkoy's analysis of positions where an opposition is suspended, with the neutralized segment treated as an archiphoneme bearing only the features common to the members of the opposition.
History
The concept of neutralization was developed by the Prague School, especially Trubetzkoy, as part of a theory of phonological oppositions. Generative phonology recast neutralization as the effect of rules, and later phonetic studies investigated whether neutralization is fully complete, finding cases of incomplete neutralization.
Debates
- Complete versus incomplete neutralization
- Phonetic measurements sometimes reveal small residual differences in supposedly neutralized contrasts, prompting debate over whether neutralization is ever phonetically complete and what this implies for phonological representation.
Key figures
- Nikolai Trubetzkoy
- Michael Kenstowicz
- Bruce Hayes
Related topics
Seminal works
- trubetzkoy1969
- kenstowicz1994
Frequently asked questions
- What is neutralization?
- Neutralization is the loss of a contrast in a particular environment. For example, in languages with final devoicing, the voicing distinction between sounds like the final consonants of underlying voiced and voiceless words disappears at the end of a word.
- What is an archiphoneme?
- An archiphoneme is the abstract unit posited for a position of neutralization, specified only for the features shared by the neutralized phonemes and unspecified for the feature whose contrast is suspended.