Locality In Vowel Harmony

This work offers phonologists new evidence that viewing vowel harmony through the lens of relativized minimality has the potential to unify different levels of linguistic representation and different domains of empirical inquiry in a unified framework.

This book deals with the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a phonological process whereby all the vowels in a word are required to share a specific phonological property, such as front or back articulation. Vowel harmony occurs in the majority of languages of the world, though only in very few European languages, and has been a central concern in phonological theory for many years. In this volume, Harry van der Hulst puts forward a new theory of vowel harmony, which accounts for the patterns of and exceptions to this phenomenon in the widest range of languages ever considered. The book begins with an overview of the general causes of asymmetries in vowel harmony systems. The two following chapters provide a detailed account of a new theory of vowel harmony based on unary elements and licensing, which is embedded in a general dependency-based theory of phonological structure. In the remaining chapters, this theory is applied to a variety of vowel harmony phenomena from typologically diverse languages, including palatal harmony in languages such as Finnish and Hungarian, labial harmony in Turkic languages, and tongue root systems in Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Tungusic languages. The volume provides a valuable overview of the diversity of vowel harmony in the languages of the world and is essential reading for phonologists of all theoretical persuasions.

Vowel harmony is a well known phonological phenomenon found in a large number of languages spoken mainly in Eurasia and the African continent. In simple terms, vowel harmony is a law which governs the co-occurrence of vowels within a span of utterance, nearly always the word. The contributions of this volume focus on various (not always uncontroversial) aspects of vowel harmony that include typological investigations, phonetic/acoustic experimental studies, descriptions of individual systems, genetic and historical ramifications, and implications for a variety of theoretical models. This volume will prove to be a useful guide to the multifaceted issues posed by an often discussed and quite significant phonological process. This volume will stimulate further discussion and better understanding of the issues raised by the intricate process called vowel harmony.

Phonology - the study of how the sounds of speech are represented in our minds - is one of the core areas of linguistic theory, and is central to the study of human language. This handbook brings together the world's leading experts in phonology to present the most comprehensive and detailed overview of the field. Focusing on research and the most influential theories, the authors discuss each of the central issues in phonological theory, explore a variety of empirical phenomena, and show how phonology interacts with other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology, phonetics, and language acquisition. Providing a one-stop guide to every aspect of this important field, The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology will serve as an invaluable source of readings for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, an informative overview for linguists and a useful starting point for anyone beginning phonological research.

This work elucidates the nature of the notion of Locality in phonology, describing the minimal conditions under which sounds assimilate to one another. The central thesis is that a sound can assimilate to another sound only if gestural contiguity is established between these two sounds. The argument supporting the central thesis of this book is unique in bringing evidence from articulatory dynamics, electromyography, and cross-linguistic sound patterns to converge on the same notion of locality in phonology. This book will be of particular interest to researchers in phonetics, phonology, and morphology, as well as to cognitive scientists interested in how the grammar may include constraints that emerge from the physical aspects of speech.

This dissertation examines the phonological patterning as well as phonetic characteristics of transparent vowels in Hungarian palatal vowel harmony. Traditionally, these vowels are assumed to be excluded from participating in harmony alternations. The experimental data presented in this dissertation run contrary to this assumption. The data show that transparent vowels in Hungarian are articulated differently depending on the harmonic domain in which they occur. Based on this observation, the central claim defended and formalized in this dissertation is that continuous phonetic details of all stem vowels including the transparent vowels are relevant for the phonological alternation in suffixes. The dissertation proposes an integrated model that relates phonetic and phonological aspects of vowel harmony using the formal language of non-linear dynamic. The advantage of this approach is in its potential to capture both qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of the same pattern in a unified way. Crucially, a dynamic approach allows one to express both phonological and phonetic generalizations while maintaining the essential distinction between them. Hence, the dynamic approach provides a feasible research strategy in the quest for understanding one of the continuing challenges in the study of speech: the relation between phonology - the mental or symbolic aspects of our speaking competence, and phonetics - continuous physical manifestations of this competence. Applied to the particular case of transparency in Hungarian vowel harmony, the premise of interdependency between the phonetic properties of the stem vowels and the phonological patterns of suffix selection allows for an explanation of a broad range of data. Most importantly, it provides a motivation for the cross-linguistic generalizations related to transparent vowels in palatal vowel harmony systems. In addition, the effects of tongue body height, lip rounding, and surrounding vocalic context on the suffix selection in Hungarian receive a natural and lawful explanation. To summarize, this dissertation presents novel experimental data from the production of transparent vowels in Hungarian. The proposed integrated model, relating phonetics and phonology using the formal language of non-linear dynamic, achieves a unified explanation of both the phonetic and phonological generalizations observed in the data and the literature.

This work elucidates the nature of the notion of Locality in phonology, describing the minimal conditions under which sounds assimilate to one another. The central thesis is that a sound can assimilate to another sound only if gestural contiguity is established between these two sounds. The argument supporting the central thesis of this book is unique in bringing evidence from articulatory dynamics, electromyography, and cross-linguistic sound patterns to converge on the same notion of locality in phonology. This book will be of particular interest to researchers in phonetics, phonology, and morphology, as well as to cognitive scientists interested in how the grammar may include constraints that emerge from the physical aspects of speech.