Locality in Vowel Harmony

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments There is a kind of poetry and elegance in the rules governing the way words are formed. It is a thrill to see how languages around the globe conform to these rules of how the vowels in a word fall into place. In my discovery of the principles and parameters of vowel harmony, I greatly appreciate the guidance and support of my mentors in graduate school, Morris Halle, Michael Kenstowicz, Donca Steriade, and Bert Vaux, for their intellectual guidance in developing a wholly new model of vowel harmony and helping me to find the right case studies to make the arguments . I would like to thank many students and colleagues at Harvard, in particular Marc Hauser, Jay Jasano¤, Peter Jenks, Beste Kamali, John Lechner, Patrick Liu, Tim O’Donnell, Gabriel Poliquin, Bridget Samuels, Kobey Shwayder, and Daniel Wallach, for the opportunity to discuss this model extensively in courses and individually. David Braun, Brian Gainor, Max Guimarães, John McCarthy, Raphael Nevins, and Cilene Rodrigues read through a number of chapters of the manuscript and provided invaluable feedback. The reports of three anonymous LI Monographs reviewers were extremely insightful and enabled me to clarify and rethink many details of the proposals advanced here. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Ada Brunstein, Jay Keyser, and Anne Mark for their extensive editorial support. And finally, I would like to thank you, dear reader, without whom this book would be but a tree falling in a forest. ...