Towards a typology of disharmony

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20344126
AutoresPaul Kiparsky, Karl Pajusalu (0000-0001-5554-5049)
Año2003
Volumen20
Número2-4
Fecha de publicación2003-01-19
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Linguistic Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0167-6318 • E-ISSN: 1613-3676
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/tlir.2003.009
OpenAlexW2029450805
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas21
Referencias citadas9

We propose an OT-theoretic typology of vowel harmony systems based on a comparative study of front/back harmony. Harmony processes are governed by a general constraint that imposes feature agreement on neighboring segments. Disharmonic (“neutral”) segments arise when this constraint is dominated by markedness constraints and/or by faithfulness constraints that govern segment inventories. These constraint interactions determine whether disharmonic segments are opaque or transparent, and fix the cross-linguistically diverse behavior of the latter. We make crucial use of two modes of local constraint conjunction, which are already implicit in the current theory. Our proposal restricts this theory by eliminating the possibility of freely stipulating the domain of local conjunction. 1 Harmony 1.1 Balto-Finnic vowel harmony The scope of a harmony process in a language is determined by its phonological inventory in two respects. 1 First, harmony spreads a feature to the fullest extent that the inventory allows: morphological restrictions aside, all lexically contrastive vowels participate in vowel harmony unless some constraint on the distribution of the harmonic feature prevents it. Secondly, only

Linguistic typology · Linguistics · Sociology · Typology · Anthropology · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Speech Recognition and Synthesis