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This paper investigates back/front vowel harmony in the Kihnu variety of Estonian. Data from the Estonian Dialect Corpus are analyzed to inform the description of harmony in this dialect, a phenomenon that has been understudied in the literature. Previously reported patterns of categorical harmony (/u/-/y/ and /ɑ/-/æ/ pairs) and transparency (/i/) are confirmed. However, the corpus provides insufficient direct evidence to either support or refute previous descriptions of the /o/-/ø/ pair as non-participatory. Subtleties of a relationship previously described as variable (/e/-/ɤ/ pair) are explored in more depth, with /e/ proposed as a second transparent vowel. Vowel harmony is also explored in Kihnu Estonian’s rich inventory of diphthongs, with intra-syllabic harmony in diphthongs shown to occur at a similar rate to that of inter-syllabic harmony between monophthongs.

Chong (2017) claims that a derived environment process is productive to the extent that it is supported by phonotactics. The present study tests this claim by comparing variable patterns observed in Korean vowel harmony of suffix alternation with vowel co-occurrence restrictions in the lexicon. A corpus study replicated findings of previous studies that the harmony in suffix alternation is losing productivity, conditioned by the quality of the stem vowel, the number of intervening consonants between the vowels and the stem class. Phonotactic generalisations in vowel sequences matched such tendencies in the alternation in that harmony was feeble in phonotactics and that some of the factors that modulate the harmony in alternation were found to affect the harmony in phonotactics as well. The findings generally support Chong’s claim that lack of phonotactic support for an alternation makes it harder to learn.

In Gua, an underdocumented Tano Guang language spoken in Ghana, regressive ATR vowel harmony applies within words and non-iteratively across word boundaries. Although vowel harmony is known to cross word boundaries in some languages, little is known about the domains and extent of such harmony. We show that ATR harmony in Gua operates within phonological phrases that preferentially consist of two or three words, with binary phrases at the left edge and ternary phrases at the right edge of the utterance. Syntactic structure can exert an influence, but only with respect to subjects. In addition, we demonstrate that unary phrases are permitted, but not at the edge of the utterance. Gua is the first reported vowel harmony case that shows the same kind of phonological phrasing sensitivity as other prosodic phenomena, such as tone and duration.

A view of the locality conditions on vowel harmony, aligning empirical phenomena within phonology with the principles of the Minimalist program. Vowel harmony results from a set of restrictions that determine the possible and impossible sequences of vowels within a word. The study of syntax begins with the observation that the words of a sentence cannot go in just any order, and the study of phonology begins with the same observation for the consonants and vowels of a word. In this book, Andrew Nevins investigates long-distance relations between vowels in vowel harmony systems across a range of languages, with the aim of demonstrating that the locality conditions that regulate these relations can be attributed to the same principle that regulates long-distance syntactic dependencies. He argues that vowel harmony represents a manifestation of the Agree algorithm for feature-valuation (formulated by Chomsky in 2000), as part of an overarching effort to show that phonology can be described in terms of the principles of the Minimalist program. Nevins demonstrates that the principle of target-driven search, the phenomenon of defective intervention, and the principles regulating the size of the domain over which dependencies are computed apply to both phonological and syntactic phenomena. Locality in Vowel Harmony 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. Moreover, Nevins's specific implementation of the locality of dependencies represents a major advance in understanding constraints on possible harmonic languages.An online tool on the MIT Press Web site demonstrates the algorithm for calculating vowel harmony with the derivations exemplified in the book.

No persuasive explanation has been offered for the exceptional disharmony in Finnish merta ’sea-part.sg’ and verta ’blood-part.sg’ until now. In this paper, it is argued that the reason for this phenomenon is complex. On the one hand, the word initial pattern #(C)ertä occurred only in these two forms, while the pattern #(C)erta was - and is - much more common. On the other hand, the change of the forms under analogical pressure was facilitated by the fact that they were isolated inside the paradigm; and therefore, intraparadigmatic analogy could not retard the change.

(1) Like many other Kwa languages, Anum employs a pattern of [ATR] vowel harmony that is regressive and [+ATR] dominant (RVH). This paper analyses RVH as a phrasal process which takes into account recursive phonological phrases. The proposal argues for an application of the process within and across non-maximal phonological phrases (φ) and a blocking of application across maximal phonological phrases (φmax). (2) Investigating RVH in Anum in more detail, the size of constituents and the complexity of sentence structures are varied. Target sentences were recorded and transcribed for [ATR] vowel harmony. (3) The empirical data show that RVH applies frequently between words that belong to either the same or to different syntactic constituents, but is blocked between two verb phrases of a serial verb construction and between any word and a following sentence-final time adverbial. Interestingly, RVH occurs between a sentence-initial subject constituent and a following verb or verb phrase, independent of the size of the subject constituent and the remaining number of words in the sentence. (4) The proposed OT analysis accounts for RVH within syntax-phonology Match Theory and addresses both word-level and phrase-level harmony. The special behaviour of subject constituents that prosodically phrase together with verbs and with constituents of the verb phrase (VP) is discussed. Either a phonological well-formedness constraint or a syntactically distinct input may account for phrasing effects with subject constituents in Anum.

This article explores the viability of using feature spreading and stem-affixed form faithfulness approaches to account for the attested patterns in Igbo root-outward vowel harmony. The analysis shows that the former undergenerates the attested patterns and makes incorrect predictions about the direction of the harmonic feature for Igbo verbs with affixes at either end of the root vowel, whereas the stem-affixed form faithfulness approach is shown to provide a more parsimonious account of the attested patterns following the morphological structure of Igbo verb roots and their affixes. This leads to the conclusion that the superiority of the stem-affixed form faithfulness proposal to the feature spreading account lies in the fact that the former captures straightforwardly the principal empirical generalization about the evident asymmetry existing between Igbo verb roots and affixes forbidding root vowels from alternating to agree with affix vowels even if this leads to incomplete harmony.

The ATR vowel harmony patterns observed in Kinande have received persistent attention for their combination of stem control and dominance, as well as less familiar phenomena such as dominance reversal and cross-word harmony. This paper provides a Syntagmatic Correspondence analysis of the Kinande vowel harmony system and demonstrates that it straightforwardly accounts for the intricate interaction of featural, directional and morpho-prosodic domain restrictions that define the occurring harmony patterns. The analysis obviates an appeal to dominance reversal, and cross-word harmony is shown to be phonological, not phonetic (contra Archangeli & Pulleyblank 2002; Kaisse 2019), yielding to a non-stratal analysis in the approach adopted. The analysis thus provides additional evidence for incorporating directionality into the formalization of Syntagmatic Correspondence constraints and for morpho-prosodic domain limitations on these and other OT constraints.

Although Erzya harmony is discussed as a kind of vowel harmony traditionally, suffix alternations show that there is a close interaction between consonants and vowels, therefore we should speak about a consonant-vowel harmony. This paper demonstrates that the palatalizedness of the consonants and the frontness of the vowels are also strongly connected inside stems: first syllable front vowels are quite rare after word-initial non-palatalized dentals but are dominant after palatalized ones; first syllable back vowels are dominantly followed by non-palatalized dentals, while the latter are very rare after front vowels.

Yeyi (Bantu, R41) is an endangered language spoken in northwestern Botswana and northeastern Namibia. Yeyi exhibits two peculiar processes of regressive vowel harmony. The first changes a high front vowel /i/ to a back vowel /u/ when followed by a syllable containing a back vowel /u/, as in ʃi-púndi > [ʃùpúndì] ‘brat’, or /o/, as in ʃi-bowuma > [ʃu-bowuma] ‘kind of snake’, or the glide /w/, as in ʃi-hweta > [ʃuhweta] ‘conversation’. This paper analyzes these two vowel harmony processes in Yeyi, using data from a wide variety of published sources on different Yeyi regiolects. I will show that the use of vowel harmony differs between regional varieties of Yeyi, with certain varieties using vowel harmony in more phonological contexts than others. The diachronic functioning of vowel harmony is also discussed, comparing vowel harmony involving affixes to vowel harmony involving only lexical roots. Finally, a comparative perspective is taken, showing that regressive vowel harmony as used in Yeyi is rarely seen in Bantu languages of Southern Africa, but occurs sporadically in Khoe languages, suggesting that regressive vowel harmony in Botswana may be an areal phenomenon.