Towards a Typology of Disharmony

• Main Authors: Paul Kiparsky, Karl Pajusalu
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2003
• Subjects: votic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.419.8473; http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/harmonytypes.pdf

We propose an OT-theoretic typology of vowel harmony systems based on a comparative study of front/back harmony. Its treatment of neutral vowels improves on those offered by sympathy, turbidity, and targeted constraints. 1 Harmony 1.1 Balto-Finnic vowel harmony The scope of a harmony process in a language is determined by its phonological system. 1 Specifically, cross-linguistic analysis reveals two generalizations that connect vowel harmony processes to vowel inventories. The first generalization is that harmony spreads a feature to the fullest extent that the vowel system allows: morphological restrictions aside, all lexically contrastive vowels participate unless some constraint on the distribution of the harmonic feature prevents it. The second generalization is that only lexically contrastive vowels participate in vowel harmony, or, to put it another way, lexical harmony is typically structure-preserving, in the sense that it introduces no new vowel types. 2 For example, the fact that i and e do not become *i and *õ (back i and back e) in back harmony contexts in Finnish is connected with the fact that *i and *õ are not phonemic in the language, as we can tell independently from the fact that they do not occur in initial syllables, which display the language’s full set of vowel contrasts. Votic and South Estonian, closely related languages which do have e∼õ harmony, have phonemic /õ/, which is distinctive in initial syllables. These two generalizations hold for all front/back harmony systems that we know of. All Balto-Finnic languages, at least, obey in principle the same front/back harmony constraint. Their actual harmony patterns vary quite widely, according to how they interact with other constraints. Wiik 1988 documents seven vowel systems in Estonian dialects, and harmony operates to the fullest extent in each. All seven of these vowel systems are also instantiated outside of Estonian in other Balto-Finnic languages, and in all of them too harmony operates to the fullest extent. The following table ...