A featural paradox in Votic harmony

In this paper we present a novel argument against strict locality in vowel harmony: a vowel's feature may have a double identity, active in one process and neutral in another. Such is the behavior of [back] in Votic [i]. It is invisible to harmony, while simultaneously triggering an assimilatio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Natural language and linguistic theory 2016-11, Vol.34 (4), p.1167-1180
Main Authors: Blumenfeld, Lev, Toivonen, Ida
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Assimilation
Consonants
Correspondence theory
Finno Ugric languages
Halle, Morris
Kiparsky, Paul
Linguistic typology
Linguistics
Long distance
Musical consonance
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Paradoxes
Philosophy of Language
Phonetics
Phonology
Social Sciences
Tableaux
Theory
Vowel harmony
Vowels
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Summary:In this paper we present a novel argument against strict locality in vowel harmony: a vowel's feature may have a double identity, active in one process and neutral in another. Such is the behavior of [back] in Votic [i]. It is invisible to harmony, while simultaneously triggering an assimilation process. We argue that no feature-sharing account of this phenomenon is plausible, including the relatively powerful extension of Span Theory that permits vowels in a harmonic span to remain unassociated (and unharmonized) with the span's head. We offer instead an account based on the Agreement-By-Correspondence approach to long-distance assimilation.
ISSN:0167-806X
1573-0859
DOI:10.1007/s11049-016-9329-9