1 Chapter 2: The role of consonants in vowel harmony 2 Gunnar Ólafur Hansson To appear in The Oxford Handbook of Vowel 3 University of British Columbia Harmony, ed. by Nancy Ritter and Harry van 4
[email protected] der Hulst. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 5 NON-FINAL DRAFT (April 3, 2021) 6 2.1 Introduction 7 Vowel harmony is defined as a phonological process, or co-occurrence restriction, that requires 8 the vowels within some domain, such as the word, to share some property. Generally speaking, 9 consonants are thus taken to be irrelevant and inert in the manifestation of vowel harmony 10 patterns. Other things being equal, then, a consonant will neither undergo nor trigger assimilation 11 in the harmonic property, nor will intervening consonants affect (e.g. block) enforcement of the 12 harmony relation between a preceding and a following vowel. 13 This chapter examines the diverse ways in which indiviDual vowel harmony systems may 14 deviate from this default state of affairs. Consonants can be implicated in vowel harmony 15 systems in a variety of ways, and such cross-over effects can have implications for phonological 16 theory, informing theories of representation (e.g. distinctive feature theory, feature geometry, 17 underspecification theory) and of the formal mechanisms that are understood to be involved in 18 assimilation (e.g. feature spreading vs. agreement/copying, relations between segments vs. 19 syllable nuclei). 20 I begin by considering the possibility that consonants may themselves be undergoers of 21 vowel harmony, albeit only in a passive, allophonic sense (§2.2).