Search Results

The first chapter of this book offers an overview of the general causes of asymmetries in vowel harmony systems. This overview will characterize the general nature of vowel harmony, yet focus on what is taken to be a key issue in this area of phonology, which is the behavior of vowels ‘that do not play ball’. The chapter also provides an overview of general issues and characteristics such as vowel harmony, symmetrical harmony, transparency, opacity, root control, dominant/recessive systems, and harmonic domains.

The Search procedure for vowel harmony finds and copies feature-values from the closest element satisfying a certain need. In delimiting the search domain, crosslinguistic variation arises in large part due to language-specific reference to two paradigmatic properties defined by the inventory of sounds in the language. This chapter examines crosslinguistic variation in what is excluded from the search domain and considers how the grammatical options within a relativized-search-domain approach to feature-copying rules limit the range of “transparency” effects in harmony. It demonstrates how substantially different surface behavior may occur in harmony, as shown in the contrast between Ife Yoruba and Standard Yoruba. The chapter also illustrates how locality may be relativized to certain types of properties of phonological features: the contrastiveness or markedness of the features in the segment that bears them. Finally, it highlights some similarities between vowel harmony and the tradition of relativized minimality that assumes a theory of closest relevant element within syntax.

In this chapter the standard treatments of the Transeurasian vowel correspondences are reviewed, including their reconstructions of hypothetical proto-inventories, for the purpose of establishing a description of the Transeurasian vowel inventory and vowel harmony type. The review commences with a comparison of two major types of vowel-harmony systems in the Transeurasian languages, i.e. the palatal vs. the tongue-root harmony systems, and presents phonetic, phonological, and comparative evidence for a tongue-root harmony analysis of Korean, Mongolic, and Tungusic. Interpretations of the main Transeurasian reconstructions are then proposed, such as Ramstedt (1952–66) and Poppe (1960b) according to tongue-root harmony analysis as opposed to the conventional palatal harmony analysis. After this, there is an effort to situate the Transeurasian vowel inventory in its typological and geographical neighborhood, including Northeast Asian languages and beyond, and in its linguistic geographical setting.

This chapter examines the Search procedure, the primary mechanism underlying vowel harmony that seeks the closest element satisfying a certain need (for example, setting the value of harmony). It shows that locality is best modeled by measuring from the dependent element (the recipient of a feature-value) rather than from the donor element. The Search procedure is applied in Turkish, Woleaian, and Barra Gaelic harmony, and vowel harmony is situated within the rubric of search for closest element, a central focus of inquiry in the minimalist approach to linguistic computation. The chapter also demonstrates that harmony and Agree both concentrate on finding a value, how harmony can iterate from one morpheme to another, and how non-undergoing morphemes can still be donors.

This book explores vowel harmony, a set of restrictions that determine the possible and impossible sequences of vowels within a word, and the long-distance dependency relationships in languages with such restrictions. It argues that, in languages with vowel harmony, the relationships between vowels are governed by relativized locality rather than absolute locality. It also shows how vowel harmony differs from coarticulation and suggests that locality is not measured by pure distance in syntax. In addition, the book demonstrates how subsegmental phonology can be insightfully modeled according to the core tenets of the Minimalist Program and how the core locality computation that drives Agree and vowel harmony differs only in the alphabet of data structures to which it applies. It explains how the Search procedure works for harmony and why the locality of harmony should be computed from the point of view of the needy segment. Finally, the book considers a number of cases where harmony does not occur.

When conducting a search and you stop, locality arises. Locality has two components: minimality and boundedness. In syntactic theory, minimality does not permit searching for an element beyond a defective one. This chapter considers the extent to which a search can go before it gives up. It shows how crosslinguistic and even within-language variation in vowel harmony can occur as a result of different settings of “how far a vowel is able to look”—where the search must end, whether something is found or not. The chapter illustrates the parametric variation in the extent of the search domain in Hungarian and Gikuyu and discusses how high-sonority elements may also close off a search domain. Finally, it demonstrates sonority in Hungarian, Finnish, Wolof, and Classical Manchu low vowels.

Bantu vowel phonemes are reflexes of the Proto-Bantu seven-vowel system /*i *ɪ * ε‎ *a *ɔ *ʊ *u/. While lax high vowels were supplanted in some systems because of vowel mergers in the first two degrees /*i *ɪ/ and /*u *ʊ/, lax mid vowels / ε‎ ɔ/ are attested across most Bantu languages either underlyingly or at surface. Widespread use of roman orthographic vowels has left the phonemic status of mid vowels fuzzy. Here the orthography is treated as a “mask” disguising the phonetic quality of vowels, to be “unmasked” with the help of proper documentation and description. With examples from endangered Bantu languages of Tanzania and from Swahili current vowel documentation methodologies and theoretical approaches for unmasking are discussed. The distribution of mid vowels is characterized with a theory of markedness which contributes to understanding why lax mid vowels may be either triggers or targets of harmony and why a low vowel may be opaque or transparent to harmony.

Unlike their Andean neighbours, Amazonian languages tend to have just one liquid phoneme (frequently, a flap). Some have no liquids at all. There are usually more affricates than fricatives. A typical Amazonian vowel system includes a high central ɨ, something not typical for the Andes. We start with a bird’s eye view of consonants in Amazonian languages, and move on to unusual and rare sounds and sound systems. We then turn to syllable structure. Some Amazonian languages have large systems of nasal vowels; in others, nasalization, and glottalization are phonological processes. Many Amazonian languages have stress systems. Tones tend to be found in areal clusters, to the north and to the south of the River Amazon. There are very few Amazonian languages with more than just two tones. Some languages lose their tones as they become obscolescent. In Appendix, ‘How Amazonian languages compare with their neighbours’, we discuss South American languages spoken in the vicinity of Amazonia.

Based on a small parametric space, the Search procedure for vowel harmony can relativize its locality in very limited ways. This chapter looks at the conditions that determine whether an element that has been found can be successfully copied from or not. Elements that cannot be successfully copied from, despite their inclusion in the search domain, are known as blockers, the effect of which is an inviolable principle of locality. The search fails when an intervening segment exists between the value-seeking recipient and its donor in the search domain. A defective element in the search domain prevents a successful search, subsuming the locality effects called “blocking” or “opaqueness.” The chapter illustrates the effects of failed copying due to minimality in Kisa, Nawuri, Jingulu, and Khalkha Mongolian.

The Minimalist Program makes two key assumptions about the design of human language. First, computations are derivational and efficient and follow principles of least effort in order to satisfy feature-valuation. Second, minimalist computations are interface-driven, with vowel harmony lying at the interface between lexicon and phonetic realization—two components of human cognition. This chapter explores the implications of a single principle of locality, and its consequences for our understanding of the structural similarities between phonology and syntax within the human language faculty. It also discusses the hypothesis of Crossmodular Structural Parallelism, examines whether assimilation and dissimilation are subroutines of harmony, and looks at languages where vowel harmony is not possible. Finally, the chapter considers areas of potential future collaboration with other branches of linguistics and cognitive science.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Chichewa vowel phoneme inventory and its relation to the Proto-Bantu vowel inventory. The distribution of vowels in different morphological and phonological positions in the word is taken up next. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of Bantu vowel height harmony (VHH), a process that conditions the possible vowel combinations in stems in Chichewa as in many Bantu languages. Data from a range of morphological and phonological contexts is provided to show that vowel harmony patterns in Chichewa fit Hyman’s (1999b) characterization of “canonical” Bantu VHH. Accounting for vowel harmony—and in particular Bantu VHH—has played an important role in the development of phonological theories of the representation and assimilation of vocalic properties from the 1980s to the present (Hyman 2003d). For this reason, the chapter takes up three different theoretical approaches to Bantu VHH in some detail.

In this chapter, I analyse modern Portuguese metaphonic verbs of the infinitive shape ‐u(C)C‐ir and ‐o(C)C‐ir. I revise some of the most prominent hypotheses concerning the evolution of the metaphonic pattern. By comparison with Modern Galician and medieval Galician‐Portuguese I show that the pattern emerges after a period of free variation from normative strategies, but not earlier than in the sixteenth century. There is evidence that vowel neutralization in pretonic position has influenced the development. Conversely, vowel harmony with the thematic vowel is very unlikely to have played a role in the evolution of the metaphonic pattern.

This chapter gives an introduction to the basic structures of Khalkha Mongolian, most of which are similar to those of Mongolian proper in general. Segmental phonology (vowels and consonants) and word structure are analyzed. Major changes from earlier stages of the language are described briefly, as is the writing system, based on the Cyrillic alphabet. Vowel harmony, based on pharyngeality (ATR) and rounding, has several interesting properties, including the opacity of high rounded vowels to rounding harmony. There is a rich derivational and inflectional morphology based on suffixes. Basic syntactic structures, including word order and case marking of arguments in simple and complex clauses, are described, as are the functions of different verb forms (finite verbs, converbs, and participles). The description emphasizes the central place of Mongolian proper in the typology of the Transeurasian languages.

This chapter provides support for the view of sound change as being listener-driven, specifically with respect to vowel harmony as the result of phonologized vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. It is shown, by means of a computational model, that coarticulatorily-perturbed outputs, coupled with biased perception, result in a pressure towards harmonization when iterated across multiple generations of transmission and acquisition. The model also preliminarily addresses the actuation problem of Weinreich et al. (1968), demonstrating that the march toward harmony need not be inexorable in a diachronic functional model.

The Southwestern (Oghuz) branch of Turkic consists of languages that are largely mutually intelligible, and are similar with respect to their structural properties. Because Turkish is the most prominent member of this branch with respect to number of speakers, and because it is the best-studied language in this group, this chapter describes modern standard Turkish as the representative of that branch and limits itself to describing Turkish. The morphology of Oghuz languages is agglutinative and suffixing; their phonology has vowel harmony for the features of backness and rounding; their basic word order is SOV, but most are quite free in their word order and are wh-in-situ languages; their relative clauses exhibit gaps corresponding to the clause-external head, and most embedded clauses are nominalized. Fully verbal embedded clauses are found, too. The lexicon, while largely Turkic, also has borrowings from Arabic, Persian, French, English, and Modern Greek and Italian.

Patterns of lexical frequency are known to mirror facts of phonological markedness. This chapter addresses the question of whether the frequency of a given sequence of segments in the lexicon is determined directly by its phonological markedness, or instead by the phonetic facts that are often the source of such markedness. Two cases of 'underphonologization' are investigated, where one phonetic pattern is known to influence phonological patterns, while another similar phonetic pattern is not. In both cases, preliminary results suggest that phonetic patterns that never influence phonology also have no effect on lexical frequency. This in turn suggests that it is phonology, rather than phonetics directly, that influences patterns of lexical frequency.

The principles of twofold vowel harmony and fourfold vowel harmony form, together with a number of consonant assimilations, the core of what at first sight looks like an enormous variation in suffixes. Since this apparent proliferation is largely predictable, it can neatly be reduced by adopting archetypical notations: –(y)E can be rewritten as four variants of the dative suffix: –ye, –ya, –e, and –a, and similarly, using –TE for the locative is more economical than spelling out –te, –ta, –de, and –da all the time. Another important issue is the question of how to deal with variable word stems. Only five noun classes exhibit stem variation: a dictionary form and an alternative stem; the latter being employed when a vowel follows via suffixation. The underlying mechanism is the process of re-syllabification, as set forth in the final section.