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Chapter 2 Background to Vowel Harmony Chapter 2 Background to Vowel Harmony 1 Introduction The aim of this chapter is to familiarise the reader with the concept of vowel harmony, and present some of the novel assumptions about the phenomenon that will be pursued in the rest of the dissertation. This chapter is organised as follows: Section 1 explores the extant definitions of harmony and points out their inadequacies. Section 2 discusses harmony properties of languages following the basic requisites of their organisation into feature inventories and domains. Section 3 deals with various domains, defined in terms of phonological and morphological factors, which have been known to be independent factors which constrain occurrences of vowel harmony. Section 4 attempts to arrive at a consistent and coherent classification of metaphony (and to a lesser extent Germanic umlaut), but shows that both, especially so-called metaphony, are equivalent to harmony, and the only difference lies in the factors which constrain them. 1.1 Definitions of harmony The scope of this dissertation is vowel harmony and a characterisation of the process is therefore indispensable for our purposes. But it is no easy task to define and contain the wide variety of processes encountered within the scope of the blanket term ‘vowel harmony’. There have been some attempts to reduce vowel harmony to only those languages which abide by a few select principles as against some others which do not meet these envisaged criteria. To reduce these often divergent behaviours to a few defining characteristics is indeed a mammoth undertaking, but I would like to explore these characteristics for an understanding of the 11 phenomenon at hand. The principles below were proposed to characterise harmony by Ultan (1973), and then by Clements (1977a): 1.2 Principles of vowel harmony (7) Ultan presents five defining characteristics of vowel harmony: a) The triggering element is always a vowel. b) The triggering vowel is a root or stem vowel. c) The domain of vowel harmony is the phonological or morphological word. d) Vowel harmony systematically affects all grammatical classes e) There must be at least two alternating classes of vowels in any vowel harmony system. Clements presents a set of five properties, some which are closely related to the ones noted by Ultan. Clements sees the combination of these properties as falling out of the general principles of ‘autosegmental phonology’(Goldsmith 1976, 1979) to be discussed in Chapter 3). (8) Clements’ general principles of harmony: a) Vowel harmony involves the spreading of a phonetically definable feature. b) Vowel harmony is root controlled. c) Vowel harmony is a bidirectional process. It affects both suffixes and prefixes. d) Vowel harmony applies in an unbounded manner. e) Root controlled vowel harmony is not optional. Implicit in both (7) and (8) is the notion that vowel harmony must spread from the root and also be unbounded. In a response to these definitions, Anderson (1980) seeks out to outline the general criterial properties of vowel harmony, but rejects all the properties identified by Clements, arguing that none of the characteristics are sufficient to capture the diversity seen among vowel harmony languages as also to distinguish them from other phenomena like umlaut and metaphony. According to Anderson, phonetic motivation does not always determine harmony. In Uralic and Altaic systems, historical change alters the basis of phonetic 12 motivatedness. For instance, in Buriat Mongolian, the original diphthongs /oy/ and /ay/ are realised as /œ/ and /ö/ respectively. Since these vowels were originally back vowels, they behave like other back vowels in synchronic vowel harmony as well. Unboundedness is also not sufficient to describe vowel harmony – e.g. Icelandic umlaut which can spread to the initial syllable as a result of both umlaut and reduction: (9) /banan+um/ → /banönum/ → /bönunum/ Contradictions were found to exist for each and every principle of vowel harmony. Anderson concluded that a proper definition of vowel harmony is elusive, though it may be obvious, and there are no principles as such to establish these distinctions convincingly. However, reservations among phonologists in order to accept metaphony and umlaut-like systems within the domain of harmony is widely persistent, which may be guided by Clements’ influential observations. One of the themes of this chapter is that vowel harmony refuses to be constrained by the bounds of typologies defined by Clements and Ultan. Definitions fail to circumscribe the range of vocalic agreement phenomena noticed in the world’s languages: as long as vocalic agreement exists, a language may be said to possess vowel harmony, and there is no difference between harmony and assimilation by itself. The only criteria that may play a role is the presence of two alternating sets of vowels in the inventory. When one induces the other to change, vowel harmony exists in that language. It is therefore not a worthwhile theoretical persuasion to analyse ‘vowel harmony’ and ‘assimilation’ as two separate processes, and they are the artefacts of the same motivation, i.e. agreement, and by compartmentalising the two into separate categories, one overlooks the generalisation that agreement occurs in both (see also section 4 in this chapter for more discussion in favour of this position). Ample evidence for this approach comes from the two closely related languages, Assamese and Bengali: whereas harmony is iterative and regressive in Assamese, it is non-iterative in Bengali. Going back to the definitions offered by Clements and Ultan, neither of these languages would have qualified to be harmonic, as Assamese demonstrates 13 regressive harmony where /i/ and /u/ trigger harmony only in the preceding vowels, and therefore not bi-directional, root-controlled, or word-based at all, and in Bengali /i/ and /u/ would affect only one preceding vowel and, therefore defiantly contravene all laws of harmony. Time and again in this dissertation, I come back to the point that both Assamese and Bengali are vowel harmony languages, because theoretically speaking, it will not serve any principle of economy to have different mechanisms to analyse the two languages or even to assume that they are two different processes. I will now move to section 2 where I discuss important factors regulating assimilatory behaviour, e.g. features, morphological and phonological domains, etc. 2 Conditions on Harmony In this section, I will discuss various factors which can potentially demarcate vowel harmony, such as direction and domains. The factors which set the limits of the scope of harmony in a language may be features, prosodic factors like stress, positional factors and/or universal markedness factors. Restrictions on the sequential arrangement of marked feature values provide the context for directionality in strictly directional systems, just as the direction is demarcated in morphologically conditioned systems by the root/stem or by the dominant value in phonologically controlled systems. Features interact in harmony systems in myriad ways and feature geometries over the years have tried to reflect the wide array of harmony properties. Though there are many feature groups involved in assimilatory alternation in the world’s languages (see van der Hulst and van de Weijer 1994, and Krämer 2003, for an extensive overview), in order to capture interactions among some phonological features which are frequently encountered in vowel harmony languages, I will discuss feature dependencies in two groups of harmony languages which can be broadly (and simplistically) classified as the rounding harmony and [ATR] harmony groups. Further, it will also be useful to characterise [ATR] harmony early in the discussion as the language that will be discussed extensively, i.e. Assamese will be shown to demonstrate [ATR] harmony. Section 2.1 is a prelude to [ATR] harmony in general with a follow-up 14 section in 2.2 which elaborates on directionality and domains in [ATR] harmony systems. 2.1 ATR harmony The phonetic correlate of the feature [ATR] is the advancement of the tongue root. Articulatory correlates of [ATR] may be realised as expansion of the pharyngeal cavity along with laryngeal lowering (Lindau 1975). [ATR] was traditionally thought to be synonymous with tense/close or lax/open. But Stewart (1967, 1971) argued that the category of tongue root position gave a simple explanation to phenomena like vowel harmony systems in West Africa. These systems could be accounted for by the use of [+ATR] as a feature contrasting with [-ATR], as the high, mid and low vowels contrast phonologically along the lines of [±ATR], and not height. Work by Ladefoged (1964), and Ladefoged et al (1972), have shown that tongue root position is an important factor of phonetic description as well as phonological alternation. ATR harmony as shown by Hall et al, is not confined to West African languages, such as, Yoruba, Wolof, Fula and Diola Fogni. Such harmony systems are also found in the Nilotic languages of East Africa. The Nilotic languages studied in Hall et al are Southern Nilotic (Kalenjin and Pakot) Eastern Nilotic languages (Lutoko and Maasai), Western Nilotic (Acoli, Luo, Dinka-Nuer and Shilluk). [ATR] systems are also found in the Niger-Congo language branches of Gur, Kwa, Adamawa-Eastern, Mande and Benue–Congo. Hall et al also reports [ATR] Harmony in other language families like the Afro-Asiatic family, mainly, in Somali etc. 2.2 ATR systems – vowel inventories and domains Interestingly, Stewart, following Greenberg (who first noticed that African vowel harmony systems are typically reduced), observed that languages which exhibit [ATR] vowel harmony in its fullest form tend to have five positional distinctions which can be divided into two non-overlapping sets, so that each set has an alternating counterpart in the other set, differing only so far as the harmony triggering feature value is concerned. 15 (10) [+ATR] [-ATR] i u ɪ e o ɛ ɔ a However, most languages with tongue root distinctions lack the distinction in the low vowel, leaving a nine-vowel system.
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