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Transparency and Opacity in Vowel Harmony

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Transparency and Opacity in Vowel Harmony COMPETING TRIGGERS: TRANSPARENCY AND OPACITY IN VOWEL HARMONY A Dissertation Presented by WENDELL A. KIMPER Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2011 Department of Linguistics c Copyright by Wendell A. Kimper 2011 All Rights Reserved COMPETING TRIGGERS: TRANSPARENCY AND OPACITY IN VOWEL HARMONY A Dissertation Presented by WENDELL A. KIMPER Approved as to style and content by: John McCarthy, Chair Joseph Pater, Member John Kingston, Member Caren Rotello, Member Margaret Speas, Department Chair Department of Linguistics ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A dissertation is never really a solo endeavor, and considerable thanks are due to the many sources of guidance, inspiration, support, and assistance that have con- tributed to this work. Thanks are due, first and foremost, to the committee. To my chair, John Mc- Carthy — it has been an immense privilege to work with him over so many years. He has been inspiring, terrifying, encouraging, hilarious, stern, patient, unfailingly wise, and entirely the best advisor one could possibly hope for. His guidance has made me a better phonologist, a better writer of prose, a better instructor, and possibly even a better person. To Joe Pater, who has always challenged me to take seriously ideas and theories that I was initially reluctant to consider (many of which have become integral parts of this dissertation). To John Kingston, who has taught me so much about running experiments, and whose expertise has contributed a valuable perspec- tive to this work. And to Caren Rotello, who put me through my paces in Stats Boot Camp, and inspired a lasting interest in statistical methods. This work has also benefited from productive discussions with other phonologists — thanks in particular to Gillian Gallagher, Rachel Walker, Elliott Moreton, Pe- ter Jurgec, Maria Gouskova, and Andries Coetzee. Thanks also to Brian Dillon for enthusiastic R help. The Finnish experiment in Chapter 5 was undertaken in collab- oration with Riikka Ylitalo (Oulu University). Thanks to Emily Elfner for being the voice of all my auditory stimuli, to Mallory Schleif for running many of the subjects in the discrimination experiment in Chapter 4, and to Clint Hartzell for proofread- ing assistance (all errors, of course, remain my own). This research was supported iv by grant BCS-0813829 from the National Science Foundation to the University of Massachusetts Amherst. My fellow UMass phonology students have been a valuable source of feedback and advice over the years. Many thanks to Kathryn Flack Potts, Matt Wolf, Mike Key, Kat Pruitt, Karen Jesney, Emily Elfner, Brian Smith, Kevin Mullin, Clint Hartzell, Presley Pizzo, Claire Moore-Cantwell, Robert Staubs, and Minta Elsman. Special thanks to Michael Becker, for being an older and wiser academic sibling, and for many cups of tea. My time in grad school has been made more enjoyable and infinitely more survivable by superb officemates Meg Grant, Martin Walkow, Pasha Siraj, and Emily Elfner (and by general fun-inducers Anisa Schardl and Presley Pizzo). Thanks also to the various other UMass faculty who have offered advice and wisdom (and occasional witty repartee): Ellen Woolford, Kyle Johnson, Lyn Frazier, Seth Cable, Rajesh Bhatt, and Chris Potts. A million thanks to department office staff, Sarah Vega-Liros and Kathy Adamczyk. Finally, thanks are due to my non-linguist friends and family, who patiently with- stood woeful neglect, supported me through moments of panic and doubt, and very kindly refrained from asking me why on earth I would want to do a thing like this. v ABSTRACT COMPETING TRIGGERS: TRANSPARENCY AND OPACITY IN VOWEL HARMONY SEPTEMBER 2011 WENDELL A. KIMPER Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor John McCarthy This dissertation takes up the issue of transparency and opacity in vowel har- mony — that is, when a segment is unable to undergo a harmony process, will it be skipped over by harmony (transparent) or will it prevent harmony from propagating further (opaque)? I argue that the choice between transparency and opacity is best understood as a competition between potential harmony triggers — segments are opaque when they themselves trigger spreading of the opposing feature value, and transparent when they do not. The analysis pursued in this dissertation is situated in the framework of Serial Harmonic Grammar, a variant of Optimality Theory which combines the step-wise evaluation of Harmonic Serialism with the weighted constraints of Harmonic Gram- mar. I argue that harmony is driven by a positively defined constraint, which assigns rewards rather than violations. Preferences for locality and for particular segmen- tal triggers are exerted via scaling factors on the harmony constraint — rewards vi are diminished for non-local spreading, and increased for spreading from a preferred trigger. Evidence for this proposal comes from a diverse range of vowel harmony lan- guages, in particular those with multiple non-participating segments which display asymmetries in their amenability to transparency. Segments more likely to be treated as opaque are also independently better triggers — they can be observed to be strong triggers in other contexts, and they are perceptually impoverished along the spread- ing feature dimension, which means they stand to benefit more from the perceptual advantages conferred by harmony. This proposal is also supported by experimental evidence. Results of a nonce-word discrimination task and a phoneme recall task both support the claim that harmony is perceptually advantageous; the latter suggests that this advantage obtains even among non-adjacent segments, and I argue that permitting explicitly non-local rep- resentations in harmony does not require abandoning phonetic grounding. Evidence for a trigger competition approach comes from a nonce-word study on Finnish dishar- monic loanwords, which showed that vowels which are better triggers are more likely to induce transparent harmony, and less likely to be treated as transparent themselves. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................. iv ABSTRACT ................................................... ....... vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................. 1 2. HARMONY AND NON-PARTICIPATION ....................... 10 2.1 Introduction ...................................... ..............10 2.1.1 Background: Harmonic Serialism . ....11 2.2 A Positive Harmony Imperative .......................... .........13 2.2.1 Infinite Goodness and the Serial Solution . ....17 2.2.2 The Pathologies of Negativity . .....22 2.2.3 Comparison with Targeted Constraints . .....26 2.3 FurtherPredictions ................................. .............29 2.3.1 Segment Protection Effects .......................... .......30 2.3.2 The Generality of Positivity . ....33 2.4 Sources of Non-Participation .......................... ............36 2.4.1 Feature Co-occurrence Restrictions .................. ........38 2.4.2 LexicalExceptions ................................. .......51 2.4.3 Faithfulness Asymmetries . ......57 2.4.4 Summary ......................................... .......66 2.5 Conclusion ......................................... ............67 viii 3. TRANSPARENCY, OPACITY, AND TRIGGER COMPETITION ............................................... 69 3.1 Introduction ...................................... ..............69 3.1.1 Background: (Serial) Harmonic Grammar . ...75 3.2 Locality as a Property of Triggers....................... ...........78 3.2.1 Transparency and Opacity........................... .......83 3.2.2 Distance Sensitivity . ......89 3.3 Quality Sensitivity . ...........94 3.3.1 Vowel Quality and Preferential Triggering . ....96 3.3.2 Interactions with Locality: Hungarian . ....105 3.3.3 Interactions with Locality and Faithfulness: Menominee . 110 3.3.4 Interactions with Dominance: Wolof . ...122 3.4 Similarity Sensitivity . .........127 3.4.1 The Opacity ofIcy Targets ........................... .....128 3.4.2 ParasiticHarmony .................................. .....134 3.5 The Merits of Operational Scaling . ........137 3.6 Conclusion ......................................... ...........144 4. GROUNDING NON-LOCALITY ................................ 146 4.1 Introduction ...................................... .............146 4.2 Groundingharmony .................................. ..........147 4.2.1 Articulatory grounding and strict locality . ...148 4.2.1.1 Kinande ........................................149 4.2.1.2 Finnish and Hungarian . 151 4.2.1.3 Phonetic Grounding and Preserving Strict Locality .....................................154 4.2.2 Perceptual grounding and non-locality . ....156 4.3 Experiment 1: Discrimination . ........161 4.3.1 Methods ......................................... .......163 4.3.1.1 Stimuli . 163 4.3.1.2 Subjects andTask................................ 164 ix 4.3.2 Results .......................................... .......165 4.3.2.1 OneDifferencevs. Two ...........................165 4.3.2.2 Height and ATR Interaction . 166 4.3.3 Discussion........................................ .......168 4.3.4 Summary ......................................... ......170 4.4 Experiment 2: Phoneme recall & non-locality. .......171 4.4.1 Methods ......................................... .......172 4.4.1.1 Stimuli . 172 4.4.1.2 Subjects andTask...............................
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