Is consonant harmony assimilatory?

• Main Author: Maddieson, Ian
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1939-800X
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4799794

Ohala (1990) claimed that vowel harmony is in origin a product of vowel-to-vowel assimilation across intervening consonants. Gafos (1999) essentially argued that consonant harmony may similarly be assimilatory. For this to be the case, intervening segments-typically vowels-must be capable of transmitting the harmonizing property. For some properties, such as nasality or lip-rounding such 'spreading' is non-problematic as these can be properties of either consonant or vowels. An alternative view, e.g. in Hansson (2010), is that consonant harmony (albeit more narrowly defined) is a correspondence or copying process, not an assimilatory effect. In this paper a range of attested varieties of consonant harmony will be evaluated in terms of how plausibly an assimilatory component might be involved. The analysis indicates that consonant harmony patterns vary along a scale of their likelihood to be explicable as assimilatory in nature. Processes such as sibilant harmony may have an assimilatory part, as suggested by Whalen et al (2011) and supported by a limited acoustic study reported here. However, harmony involving certain phonatory and laryngeal features, such as voicing (given that vowels are prototypically already voiced) or ejective production, does not plausibly involve assimilatory transmission of the harmonizing property.