Vowels

Vowel Harmony and Correspondence Theory covers the major issues in the generative analysis of vowel harmony and vowel harmony typology. The book offers an economical account of the most prominent features of vowel harmony systems (root control, affix control, dominance, vowel opacity, and neutrality) within the framework of optimality theory, extending the notion of correspondence to the syntagmatic dimension.The book contains a typological overview of vowel harmony patterns, an introduction to the basics of optimality theory including some of its most recent extensions and detailed studies of harmony systems in 10 languages from a variety of language families.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"The alphabet has 26 letters. Five of them are vowels: a-e-i-o-u. They can make long and short sounds. The short vowels can be used to build many simple words. Readers learn what these short vowels can do."--

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.

While it is commonly assumed that languages epenthesize context-free default vowels, this book shows that in loanword adaptation, several strategies are found which interact intricately. Large loanword corpora in Shona, Sranan, Samoan and Kinyarwanda are analyzed statistically, and the patterns are modeled in a version of Optimality Theory which introduces constraints on autosegmental representations. The focus of this book is on English loans in Shona, providing an in-depth empirical and formal analysis of epenthesis in this language. The analysis of additional languages allows for solid typological generalizations. In addition, a diachronic study of epenthesis in Sranan provides insight into how insertion patterns develop historically. In all languages analyzed, default epenthesis exists alongside vowel harmony and spreading from adjacent consonants. While different languages prefer different strategies, these strategies are subject to the same set of constraints, however. In spreading, feature markedness plays an important role alongside sonority. We suggest universal markedness scales which combine with constraints on autosegmental configurations to model the patterns found in individual languages and at the same time to constrain the range of possible crosslinguistic variation.

First Published in 1997. The alternation between high vowels and glides is shown here to follow from the interaction of phonological constraints as defined by Prince and Smolensky's (1993) Optimality Theory. The alternation stems from simultaneously comparing moraic and nonmoraic parses of high vowels for constraint satisfaction

"Bob Books long vowels introduces important new reading skills! Children learn long vowels and the magical silent e. Maturing readers' vocabularies grow quickly as they finish the stories in these eight longer books, 16-24 pages each. Upon finishing Bob Books Long Vowels, kids are proud to be ready for chapter books" -- Back of container.