A Correspondence Approach to Vowel Harmony and Disharmony*
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A Correspondence Approach to Vowel Harmony and Disharmony* Martin Krämer Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf [email protected] Abstract In the paper, it will be argued that both harmony and dissimilatory OCP effects on vowels are best analyzed as correspondence relations between output segments within certain domains, rather than as featural alignment as proposed in the literature for analyses of harmony. The presented approach allows for a unitary treatment of harmony and disharmony effects and predicts that disharmony is to be found more rarely. Furthermore, it will be shown that the prosodic domains mora and syllable play a crucial role for harmony. Under this assumption, the fact that consonants can block vowel harmony will be explained straightforwardly. Following Inkelas' (1994) theory of underspecification, the approach allows a division of harmony systems into structure changing (i.e., all overriding) and structure filling (i.e., morpheme-specific) harmony types. My argumentation is based mainly on data from Ainu, Turkish, and Yucatec Maya. 1 Introduction Assimilation and dissimilation phenomena are generally considered in isolation in the phonological literature. Recently, this has lead to a striking asymmetry in their respective analyses. In the present paper, I will argue that both phenomena call for a parallel treatment and that this can be accomplished within Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995, McCarthy 1996). I will argue against the alignment approach of feature spreading (Kirchner 1993, Cole & Kisseberth 1994, Pulleyblank, Jiang-King, Leitch & Ola 1995, Ringen & Vago 1995, Pulleyblank 1996, among others), which treats feature spreading as a special case of Generalized Alignment (McCarthy & Prince 1993). Moreover, I will argue against the approach that regards dissimilation as a local conjunction of markedness constraints (Alderete 1997), or simply takes over the OCP as it was originally formulated by Leben (1973), Goldsmith (1976), and McCarthy (1986) (McCarthy & Prince 1995, Pulleyblank 1996, Myers 1997). The feature alignment approach provides no insights into disharmonic patterns. When the latter phenomena are analysed in the local conjunction approach, they appear as completely unrelated to harmonic phenomena. Both approaches taken together do not reflect the striking parallels and interactions between harmonic and disharmonic patterns. One of the main results of this paper will be that spreading as such does not exist at all. Assimilation of features is to be regarded as a case of correspondence. To be more precise, I will assume a constraint schema, that establishes a 'surface-to-surface' correspondence relation between segments of one sound string. In an output representation, segmental features obey constraints that demand correspondence with 'neighboring' elements. The definition of neighborhood or locality will be subject to * This work was supported by a grant to the Sonderforschungsbereich 282 'Theorie des Lexikons'. I thank Heather Goad, Janet Grijzenhout, Albert Ortmann, Carsten Steins, Barbara Stiebels and Dieter Wunderlich for helpful comments, criticism and encouragement. Parts of this work were presented as posters at the 6th Manchester Phonology Workshop and the International Conference of the SFB 282 'Lexicon in Focus'. I would like to thank participants of both conferences for inspiring discussions. language-specific 'parametrization'. This parametrization crucially involves prosodic domains. Disharmonic patterns constitute violations of the constraints responsible for harmonic patterns. Under the assumption that it is generally more desirable to satisfy constraints than to violate them systematically, this leads to the prediction that dissimilation is more marked than assimilation. The nature of 'neighborhood' as it will be observed in the Yucatec data, will contradict the assumption of strict locality and coproduction implied by the alignment approach to feature spreading. Ní Chiosáin & Padgett (1997) explicitly argue for strict locality and coproduction of spreading features on all intervening segments. The Yucatec data, in turn, support a relativized locality postulate as advocated in the autosegmental literature in general. The concept of assimilation as correspondence also requires a rethinking of the notions of 'blocker' or 'opaque segment'. These are elements that intervene between the spreading element and its target, or, in the spirit of this paper, between the segments which potentially correspond to each other with respect to the relevant feature. The paper is structured as follows: In section 2, the basic assimilation phenomena as well as current approaches to harmonic and disharmonic behavior of features are introduced by Turkish examples. In section 3, morpheme-specific vowel harmonies and disharmonies are investigated, with particular focus on Yucatec Mayan and Ainu. In section 4, I will develop the basic theoretical ideas and formalizations, which will be applied to Turkish in section 5. Section 6 provides an analysis of the alternations observed in Ainu and Yucatec. In this section, the analysis will be extended to principled dissimilatory phenomena, i.e., OCP effects. Section 7 summarizes and concludes the discussion. 2 Current treatments of assimilation and dissimilation My proposal, like most other approaches discussed in this paper, is couched within Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) and/or Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995). For this reason, some basic remarks about these frameworks are in order. The nature of Optimality Theory is declarative rather than processual, hence there cannot be any intermediate steps of derivation (i.e. levels) as, e.g., in Lexical Phonology (Kiparsky 1982, 1985). Within Optimality Theory (henceforth OT) it is assumed that grammar consists of the following ingredients: First, underlying forms (the input), and surface forms (the output), are distinguished. The function GEN generates a theoretically infinite set of candidate output forms of a given input. There is a fixed set of constraints, which are ordered hierarchically, in a language-specific ranking. These constraints are violable. The function EVAL evaluates on the basis of the ranking which candidate form is the optimal output for a particular grammar. The candidate form which conforms most to the constraints that rank high wins, and is chosen as the optimal output. The main characteristic of Correspondence Theory (henceforth CT) is that there is a special relation between input and output forms. The importance of this relation is warranted by particular correspondence constraints. An underlying form should be as faithful as possible to its output form and vice versa. The crucial point is that input- 2 output correspondences are assumed for features, segments, or other grammatical structure between underlying material and surface forms.1 2.1 OT Approaches to harmony The literature on harmony and disharmony is enormous and I will restrict myself to a brief summary of the most recent approaches. Under the alignment approaches, spreading is generally analysed as a special extension of the generalized alignment schema (McCarthy & Prince 1993), as cited in (1). (1) Generalized Alignment (McCarthy & Prince 1993:80): Align (Cat1, Edge1, Cat2, Edge2) =def ∀Cat1 ∃Cat2 such that Edge1 of Cat1 and Edge2 of Cat2 coincide. Where Cat1, Cat2 ∈ PCat ∪ GCat Edge1, Edge2 ∈ {Right, Left} Paraphrased in non-technical language, this means that for all members of a certain prosodic or grammatical category there is a member of another prosodic or grammatical category, and the right (or left) edge of the former category falls together with the right (or left) edge of the latter category. Kirchner's (1993) formulation of harmony in alignment terms is given in (2). (2) Align (F, R, morphological word, R): For any parsed feature F in morphological category MCat (= root, word), the right edge of F is associated to the rightmost syllable of MCat. For a language like Turkish this means that any feature [round] or [back] should be realized on the rightmost vowel (or syllable) of a morphological word. Together with the assumption that features are lexically anchored on underlying segments this yields 'stretching' of the feature to the denoted edge. If rounding occurs in a word, it should end when the word ends (Align Right), or it should begin when the word begins (Align left). Suppose the structures in (3) were morphological words. The structure in (3a) would get two violation marks, because there are two vowels between the right edge of the form and the vowel with the feature F, that do not bear this feature. In contrast, the structure in (3b) gets no violation mark, because the right edge of the feature F coincides with the right edge of the whole form. (3) a. [F] b. [F] C VCVCV C VCVCV 1 Several phenomena like reduplication and opacity effects gave rise to different types of correspondence relations, for instance base-reduplicant or base-output correspondence. This is only interesting to see that the kind of correspondence to be established in this paper is not the only type of relation that extends the standard input-output correspondence modell. 3 I will demonstrate featural instantiations of this kind of alignment with the example of Turkish harmony in the following. Turkish has the front vowels i, ü, e, ö, and the back vowels a, o, u, ö,. All vowels in a word agree in backness and high vowels additionally agree in roundness, as exemplified in (4).