Vowel harmony and vowel merger in Agoi

This paper describes the vowel harmony system and patterns of vowel merger in Agoi, an Upper Cross language. Data indicate that a once fully operative system of vowel harmony has now been generally restricted to the non-high vowels, with a few residual instances of II u/-determined harmony. The evolution of this change is described.

Bondu-so vowel harmony: A descriptive analysis with theoretical implications

Studies in African Linguistics ◽

10.32473/sal.v41i2.107276 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 41 (2) ◽

pp. 2-26

Author(s):

Abie Hantgan ◽

Stuart Davis

Keyword(s):

Descriptive Analysis ◽

Vowel Harmony ◽

Language Data ◽

High Vowels ◽

The Relationship

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the [ATR] vowel harmony system of Bondu-so (Dogon, Mali), a previously undocumented language. Data come from fieldwork and have not yet been published. While Bondu-so has seven surface vowels, namely, two [+ATR, +high] vowels ([i], [u]), a [–ATR +low] vowel [a] and a [±ATR] contrast in the mid vowels with front [e]/[ɛ] and back [o]/[ɔ], there is evidence for a more abstract vowel system phonologically consisting of ten vowels with [±ATR] contrasts with all vowel heights. Further, the language shows a three-way contrast with respect to the feature [ATR] on suffixal vowels: some suffixal vowels act as [+ATR] dominant, spreading their [+ATR] feature onto the root; other suffixes act as [–ATR] dominant, spreading [–ATR] onto the root, and still other suffixes have vowels unspecified for [ATR] receiving their [±ATR] feature by rightward spreading of the [±ATR] value of the root vowel. We offer an autosegmental analysis and then discuss the theoretical implications of such an analysis. These implications include the ternary use of [ATR], the issue of phonological versus morphological harmony, the relationship between vowel inventories and [ATR] harmony systems, and the question of abstractness in phonology.

Aperture harmony

10.1093/oso/9780198813576.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Harry van der Hulst

Keyword(s):

Vowel Harmony ◽

Romance Languages ◽

Common Element ◽

Binary Features ◽

This chapter analyzes a number of vowel harmony systems which have been described or analyzed in terms of aperture (lowering or raising, including complete harmony). This takes us into areas where the literature on vowel harmony discusses cases involving the following binary features: [± high], [± low], [± ATR], and [± RTR]. Raising has been thought of as problematic for unary ‘IUA’ systems as these systems lack a common element for high vowels. This chapter suggests that raising can be attributed to ATR-harmony. The chapter also discusses typological generalizations and analyzes metaphony in Romance languages.

RProtoBuf: Efficient Cross-Language Data Serialization inR

Journal of Statistical Software ◽

10.18637/jss.v071.i02 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 71 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Dirk Eddelbuettel ◽

Murray Stokely ◽

Jeroen Ooms

Keyword(s):

Language Data ◽

Chapter 20. Cross-language data and theories of agrammatism

Agrammatic Aphasia ◽

10.1075/z.39.32men ◽

1989 ◽

pp. 1369-1389 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Lise Menn ◽

Loraine K. Obler

Keyword(s):

Language Data ◽

Moro vowel harmony: implications for transparency and representations

Phonology ◽

10.1017/s0952675717000069 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 163-200 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Amanda Ritchart ◽

Sharon Rose

Keyword(s):

Vowel Harmony ◽

The Other ◽

Height System ◽

This paper describes and analyses the vowel-harmony system of the Kordofanian language Moro. Moro has a cross-height dominant-recessive raising harmony system in which high vowels and a central mid vowel trigger harmony, while peripheral mid vowels and a central low vowel are harmony targets. Schwas can co-occur with any of the vowels, appearing inert to harmony. Yet when schwas occur alone in a morpheme, some trigger harmony and some do not. We suggest that an original ATR-harmony system shifted to a height system via merger and centralisation, producing two distinct central vowels, rather than a single schwa. One vowel patterns with the higher vowels in triggering harmony, and the other patterns with the lower vowels. We also propose that a particle-based representation offers the best characterisation of the groupings of target and trigger vowels in the language.

Cross-language Ontology Learning

Ontology Learning and Knowledge Discovery Using the Web ◽

10.4018/978-1-60960-625-1.ch014 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 272-297

Author(s):

Hans Hjelm ◽

Martin Volk

Keyword(s):

Information Retrieval ◽

Learning Task ◽

Formal Ontology ◽

Ontology Learning ◽

Lexical Knowledge ◽

Automatic Learning ◽

Parallel Corpora ◽

Cross Language Information Retrieval ◽

Language Data ◽

A formal ontology does not contain lexical knowledge; it is by nature language-independent. Mappings can be added between the ontology and, arbitrarily, many lexica in any number of languages. The result of this operation is what is here referred to as a cross-language ontology. A cross-language ontology can be a useful resource for machine translation or cross-language information retrieval. This chapter focuses on ways of automatically building an ontology by exploiting cross-language information from parallel corpora. The goal is to improve the automatic learning results compared to learning an ontology from resources in a single language. The authors present a framework for cross-language ontology learning, providing a setting in which cross-language evidence (data) can be integrated and quantified. The aim is to investigate the following question: Can cross-language data teach us more than data from a single language for the ontology learning task?

ATR Vowel Harmony: new patterns and diagnostics

Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology ◽

10.3765/amp.v5i0.4254 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 5 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Sharon Rose

Keyword(s):

Large Scale ◽

Vowel Harmony ◽

Perceptual Distance ◽

Perceptual Difficulty ◽

Survey Results ◽

This paper presents a large-scale typological study of over 500 Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo vowel inventories, both with and without ATR harmony. The survey reveals: i) ATR contrasts in high vowels correlate with a strong likelihood of ATR harmony; ii) the vowel system /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/ (termed 1IU in Casali 2008) does not correlate well with ATR harmony. In Nilo-Saharan, such systems do not show ATR harmony, and in Niger-Congo, the majority of such systems also do not have harmony. The survey results are interpreted in terms of perceptual distance, driven by inventory contrast. High vowel ATR contrasts are perceptually more difficult than mid contrasts and activate harmony. In languages that lack mid vowel contrasts, [+ATR] harmony derives allophonic [e o] from /ɛ ɔ/. In languages that lack high vowel contrasts, mid vowel contrasts do not present enough of a perceptual difficulty to reliably activate harmony. If harmony is present, it tends to operate only between mid vowels and does not generate allophonic high vowels.

Lexical strata and vowel (dis)harmony: the Turkish transformation of a Balkan hypocoristic

Linguistica ◽

10.4312/linguistica.56.1.309-320 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 56 (1) ◽

pp. 309-320

Author(s):

Mary Ann Walter

Keyword(s):

Survey Data ◽

Vowel Harmony ◽

Front Vowel ◽

Lexical Variation ◽

High Vowels ◽

Indexed Constraints ◽

Constraints Model

In this study I explore the phonological behavior of the hypocoristic suffix /-oʃ/-/iʃ/ in Turkish. Such a suffix is common to many of the Balkan languages. Turkish differs in its introduction of the front vowel variant of the suffix, presumably to satisfy the vowel harmony requirements in Turkish for backness and rounding in high vowels. However, in spite of the potentially alternating suffix allomorphs, collection of naturalistic data as well as of elicited survey data reveals that the majority of nickname outputs are disharmonic. I conclude that the Turkish data provides further evidence for Ito and Mester’s (2009) key insight that different strata of the lexicon may operate according to different rules/constraint rankings. However, the Turkish data is not consistent with their specific faithfulness-based approach. The hypocoristic lexical stratum exhibits a greater number of vowel harmony violations, but not due to more faithfulness to vowel inputs/underlying forms. Rather, the harmony violations in this stratum are gratuitous – I argue, precisely in order to distinguish this stratum from the lexicon at large. An approach such as Pater’s (2010) indexed constraints model better accommodates this type of lexical variation.

Tongue Root Harmony in Nata

10.1093/oso/9780190256340.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Joash J. Gambarage ◽

Douglas Pulleyblank

Keyword(s):

Vowel Harmony ◽

Noun Class ◽

High Vowels ◽

Initial Root

An examination of vowel harmony in Nata (Bantu, E45), reveals a fairly straightforward pattern of harmony in tongue root values for adjacent mid vowels. A problem arises, however, when we look at the behavior of harmony in prefixes. In some nouns, the class prefixes are retracted when the initial root vowel is retracted and advanced when the initial root vowel is advanced. Problematic, however, are other forms in which roots with initial retracted vowels condition the appearance of high vowels in the noun class prefixes. In earlier work, Gambarage argued that to account for the distinction between cases where mid vowels retract and cases where mid vowels raise to high, it is necessary to invoke two distinct co-phonologies. It is argued that the two patterns observed in Nata are readily accounted for within an “allomorphy account,” without the need to invoke multiple co-phonologies. The integration of general phonotactics governing vowel harmony with allomorphy appropriate for particular roots derives the two patterns in a unified fashion.

Asymmetric Generalisation of Harmony Triggers

Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology ◽

10.3765/amp.v3i0.3662 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Wendell Kimper

Keyword(s):

Maximum Entropy ◽

Human Subjects ◽

Artificial Grammar ◽

Vowel Harmony ◽

Perceptual Salience ◽

In vowel harmony systems, certain classes of segments may be preferred as triggers; in particular, Kaun (1995) notes that rounding harmony is preferentially triggered by non-high vowels. There is a plausible phonetic explanation for this: non-high vowels manifest F2 contrasts less prominently (Linker, 1982; Terbeek, 1977) and therefore benefit more from the boost in perceptual salience that harmony affords. In this paper, I present the results of an artificial grammar experiment suggesting, following Wilson (2006), that learners are systematically biased towards phonetically natural generalisations. Learners trained on a harmony system triggered by high vowels extended the generalisation to mid vowels, but learners trained on mid vowels varied in the breadth of their generalisation. I also show that a Maximum Entropy learner can successfully mimic the behaviour of human subjects if biases are included for both generality and phonetic naturalness.