Vowel harmony and the interaction of harmonising properties

 

John Rennison

University of Vienna

 

 

It has long been noted within autosegmental approaches to phonology that certain melodic properties ('features', elements) interact or fail to interact in interesting ways when one or more of them is involved in a vowel harmony process. For example, in Nyangumarda all of the vowels in the language (i.e. i,u,a) harmonise – i.e. their melody spreads rightwards to all consecutive nuclei that have no lexical melody. However, harmony stops once a lexically specified vowel is encountered – though this vowel in turn can spread its melody to the right if it is followed by one or more unspecified vowels. In Turkish, on the other hand, the properties of palatality (I) and rounding (U) spread rightwards without interacting at all. The presence of I does not block the spreading of U and vice versa. Also, the spreading of U is blocked by any vowel containing an A (=non-high) element, whilst the spreading of I is not.

 

In order to explain such interactions, I previously proposed (Rennison, 1990) that interacting elements shared the same autosegmental tier, whilst non-interacting elements were located on different tiers. In the meantime, phonological theory has progressed, and in particular the phonological elements ("monovalent features") of Government Phonology have been radically revised, e.g. by Kaye (2000), Ploch (1999), Scheer (1996), Rennison & Neubarth (2003) and others, I am sure. Therefore, in this paper I will re-examine the interaction of elements in vowel harmony processes, using the Rennison & Neubarth (2003) elements. In particular I will focus on the elements A and ATR, which in this version of GP have become a single element (F) with two faces: A when it is the melodic head and ATR when it is an operator. Here, the theory clearly predicts that A and ATR must constantly get in one another’s hair in vowel harmony processes.

 

In the Akan languages, the classic example used by Clements (1981) to exemplify ATR harmony in autosegmental phonology, the vowel /a/ was stipulated to block ATR harmony and no further explanation was offered. In the Rennison & Neubarth (2003) theory, this follows naturally from the obligatory tier sharing of A and ATR. Other languages, where an A element fails to block ATR harmony, are of course a problem, and will be tackled in this paper. In particular, the implications of the complex interaction of A and ATR in Mòoré will be used to shed light on such blocking failures.

 

 

References:

 

Clements, George N. 1981. Akan vowel harmony. A nonlinear analysis. In Harvard Studies in Phonology 2, ed. George N. Clements, 108-177. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Linguistics Club.

 

Kaye, Jonathan D. 2000. A user's guide to Government Phonology (GP). Ms. University of Ulster. www.unice.fr/dsl/tobweb/scan/Kaye00guideGP.pdf.

 

Ploch, Stefan. 1999. Nasals on My Mind. The Phonetic and the Cognitive Approach to the Phonology of Nasality, Dept. of Linguistics, SOAS, University of London: Ph.D. dissertation.

 

Rennison, John R. 1990. On the elements of phonological representations: the evidence from vowel systems and vowel processes. Folia Linguistica XXIV: 175-244.

 

Rennison, John R., and Friedrich Neubarth. 2003. An x-bar theory of Government Phonology. In Living on the edge, ed. Stefan Ploch, 95-130. Berlin: Mouton.

 

Scheer, Tobias. 1996. Une théorie de l'interaction directe entre consonnes, Université Paris 7: Doctoral dissertation.

 

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