Feature specications and contrast in vowel harmony: The orthography and phonology of Old Norwegian height harmony Jade J. Sandstedt A thesis submitted in fullment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosoph to Linguistics and English Language School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences University of Edinburgh 218 Declaration I declare that this thesis has been composed solely by myself and that it has not been submitted, in whole or in part, in any previous application for a degree. Except where stated otherwise by reference or acknowledgment, the work presented is entirely my own. Jade J. Sandstedt Contents Abstract v Acknowledgements viii I Introduction 1 An Old Norwegian phonological riddle 1 1.1 Introduction ............................... 1 1.1.1 The Old Norwegian riddle in other languages .......... 6 1.2 The where and why of harmony neutrality ................ 7 1.2.1 Harmony is limited by phonological contrast .......... 8 1.2.2 Harmony is not limited by phonological contrast . 1 1.3 The locus of explanation in phonology . 13 1.3.1 Grammatical vs. representational approaches . 13 1.3.2 Problems with equating dis/harmony with non-/contrastivity . 17 1.3.3 The usual way out ........................ 18 1.4 The need for a new model ........................ 22 1.5 Aims of this thesis ............................ 24 II Theoretical matters 2 Features and the contrastive hierarchy 29 2.1 Harmony as evidence for representations . 29 2.1.1 Representational overview .................... 3 2.2 Nature of phonological features ..................... 32 2.2.1 Privativity ............................ 32 2.2.2 Emergence ............................ 34 2.3 Building inventories and the Contrastivist Hypothesis . 36 2.3.1 Phonological in/activity as insight to features . 39 2.3.2 The division of sound inventories into feature classes . 42 2.3.3 Applying the Successive Division Algorithm . 44 2.3.4 Features, feature-nodes, and specications . 46 2.4 Contrastive hierarchies and emergent feature geometry . 47 2.4.1 Arguments from class spreading . 47 2.4.2 Arguments from contrast neutralisation . 5 2.5 Summary ................................ 52 i ii CONTENTS 3 The contrastive hierarchy approach to harmony 53 3.1 Harmony activity and locality according to the SDA . 54 3.1.1 Feature-nodes dene harmony locality . 54 3.1.2 Language-internal variation in representations . 58 3.1.3 Language-internal variation in harmonising domains . 6 3.2 Formalising representational and grammatical limitations on harmony . 62 3.2.1 Translating contrastive hierarchies to ranked constraints . 62 3.2.2 The basics of harmony mechanisms . 65 3.3 Feature scope and non-/conditional harmony . 7 3.3.1 Contrasting conditional and non-conditional harmony . 72 3.3.2 Parasitic harmony as feature parasitism . 75 3.3.3 Non-parasitic harmony as feature non-parasitism . 76 3.3.4 Parasitism in dual harmony systems . 78 3.3.5 Parasitism is iteratively blocking . 8 3.3.6 True vs. false parasitism ..................... 81 3.4 Summary ................................ 84 III Corpus study 4 Old Norwegian corpus material and methods 91 4.1 Chronological–geographic scope ..................... 92 4.2 Philological preliminaries to historical phonology . 94 4.3 Material sources ............................. 96 4.3.1 AM 243 bα fol.: King’s mirror . 96 4.3.1.1 Support and content . 97 4.3.2 De la Gardie no. 4–7: Strengleikar . 98 4.3.2.1 Support and content . 98 4.3.3 De la Gardie no. 8 fol: Legendary saga of St. Olaf . 1 4.3.3.1 Support and content . 1 4.3.4 Holm perg 6 fol: Barlaams ok Josaphats saga . 11 4.3.4.1 Support and content . 12 4.3.5 Holm perg 17 4to: Saga of Archbishop Thomas . 12 4.3.5.1 Support and content . 13 4.4 Medieval Nordic Text Archive transcriptions . 13 4.5 Data collection principles . 14 4.6 Vowel harmony in corpus data . 15 4.7 Etymological / phonological annotations . 16 4.8 Summary ................................ 111 5 Old Norwegian grapho-phonology 115 5.1 Old Norwegian sound–letter correspondences . 115 5.1.1 [o, ɔ, a] – <o, a> phonetic–graphic correspondence . 117 5.1.2 [e, ɛ] – <e, æ> phonetic–graphic correspondences . 121 5.1.3 Diphthongal phonetic–graphic correspondences . 126 5.1.4 Summary: graphic–phonetic correspondences . 128 5.2 Positional restrictions on the distribution of vowels . 128 CONTENTS iii 5.2.1 Stressed syllables . 13 5.2.2 Unstressed syllables . 13 5.3 Vowel harmony and harmony decay in the Old Norwegian corpus . 131 5.4 Old Norwegian harmony descriptive generalisations . 136 5.4.1 Height harmony via vowel lowering . 137 5.4.2 Neutral blocking lax mid vowels . 138 5.4.3 Harmonic blocking low vowels . 139 5.4.4 Inert diphthongs . 14 5.5 Prosodic limitations . 14 5.5.1 Non-simplex words . 141 5.5.2 Derivational suxes . 141 5.6 Harmony interactions with other sound patterns . 142 5.7 Denite enclitic (non-)exceptional patterns . 144 5.7.1 Form and function . 144 5.7.2 Vowel hiatuses and vowel deletions . 145 5.7.3 Vowel deletion and other segmental phonology . 148 5.8 Summary ................................ 15 6 Vocalic features and harmony analysis 153 6.1 Contrastive hierarchy method review . 153 6.2 Features and feature co-occurrence restrictions . 155 6.2.1 [open]; *[open, lax] > [lax] . 155 6.2.2 [open, low] . 157 6.2.3 [coronal], [labial, coronal], *[low, labial], and *[lax, labial] . 158 6.2.4 Summary of Old Norwegian vocalic features . 161 6.3 A representational analysis of Old Norwegian harmony . 162 6.3.1 Stressed vowel blocking . 164 6.3.2 Neutral and harmonic blocking . 165 6.3.3 Diphthongal non-harmony . 166 6.3.4 (Non-)exceptional denite enclitics . 167 6.3.5 Vowel harmony and vowel deletions . 168 6.4 Implications for other sound patterns . 17 6.4.1 The status of Old Norwegian height harmony and u-umlaut . 171 6.4.2 Parallel morphophonemic patterning in i-umlaut . 173 6.4.3 J-umlaut and height harmony . 175 6.5 Conclusions ............................... 176 IV Conclusions 7 Summary and conclusions 179 7.1 Acquisition and emergence of sound inventories . 18 7.2 The contrastive hierarchy and feature specications . 181 7.3 The contrastive hierarchy and harmony grammars . 184 7.4 Conclusion ................................ 187 A Cross-linguistic generalisations 189 iv CONTENTS A.1 Atlantic-Congo – Yoruba, Ekiti . 189 A.2 Atlantic-Congo – Yoruba, Ife . 19 A.3 Atlantic-Congo – Yoruba, Standard˙ . 191 A.4 Bantu – Chewa (N.31) . 191 A.5 Bantu – Gungu (J.1) . 192 A.6 Bantu – Kikuyu (E.51) . 193 A.7 Bantu – Matuumbi (P.13) . 193 A.8 Bantu – Mbunda (K.15) . 194 A.9 Bantu – Ndendeule (N.11) . 195 A.1 Bantu – Nkundo (C.6) . 195 A.11 Bantu – South Kongo (H.16a) . 196 A.12 Finno-Ugric – Finnish . 197 A.13 Germanic – Old Norwegian . 197 A.14 Mongolian – Khalkha . 198 A.15 Turkic – Yakut .............................. 199 A.16 Turkic – Turkish ............................. 199 Abstract In this thesis, I provide a new approach to the role of phonological patterning in determining the featural content of phonological relations and the size and shape of sound inventories. The empirical scope of this project has particular focus on vowel harmony and vocalic features with an extended case study of Old Norwegian. Vowel harmony, simply dened, is a process where vowels in a word show systematic correspondence for some feature. Because of its many moving parts and obvious class behaviour, vowel harmony and harmony languages provide one of the best laboratories for exploring the emergence, acquisition, specication, and common patterning of phonological features. In chapter 1 I provide an introduction to Old Norwegian vowel harmony and some unexplained harmony exceptions. This chapter explores parallel phenomena in the typology of harmony languages and the theoretical challenges these patterns pose. In particular, I illustrate that non-harmonising segments display three distinct behaviours with respect to phonological activity and visibility while the core components of popular grammatical and representational approaches to vowel harmony commonly only predict two. I suggest the solution to this problem lies in the representation and denition of phonological contrastivity. Chapter 2 presents the principal components of a new approach to the acquisition and specication of features using a version of Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (Dresher, Piggott & Rice 1994; D. C. Hall 27; Dresher 23, 29) which incorporates emergent and substance-free features and feature-nodes (Iosad 217a). In this chapter I argue that phonological features, segments, feature classes, and whole sound inventories emerge according to the Correlate Contrastivist Hypothesis which holds that a language’s phonemic inventory is dened by the set of active phonological features required to express the language’s phonological regularities. Drawing insights from Westergaard’s (29, 213, 214) model of micro-cues, I posit that language learners generalise small pieces of abstract linguistic structures (‘micro-cues’) in the form of features and feature co-occurrence restrictions while parsing linguistic input. In the course of language acquisition, these micro-cues accumulate, and the sum of these cues denes a sound inventory. I argue a segment’s feature specications and the shape of feature classes in a language are determined by a version of the Successive Division Algorithm (Dresher 29, §7.8; D. C. Hall 27, §1.2.7; Mackenzie 213, 216) which takes an ordered set of representational micro-cues as its input and returns a contrastively specied segment inventory as its output. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how these components combined with the hierarchical organisation of features aorded by the contrastive hierarchy architecture recapitulates all the important insights of feature geometry, providing an economical and principled model of phonological representations which narrowly vary cross-linguistically. v vi ABSTRACT In chapter 3 I present a formal model of harmony using a licensing approach, adapted from Iosad (217a) and Walker (25), inspired by the recipient-oriented model of Nevins (21).