Locality in Vowel Harmony

1. What Is Vowel Harmony, How Does It Vary, and Why Study It?

1 What Is Vowel Harmony, How Does It Vary, and Why Study It? It’s common when typing an e-mail that our fingers hit the wrong key, and a savvy spell-checker underlines the misspelled word in red. Suppose I’m writing about the rodent protagonist of an animated film and make a mistake in typing rat. The resulting typo might create a real word that’s di¤erent from the one I intended (e.g., ray instead of rat), or it might create an ‘‘impossible word’’ such as rta. The three-letter sequence rta could never be a word of English because of a constraint prohibiting the consonant sequence rt at the beginning of a syllable. The study of syntax begins with the observation that the words of a sentence cannot go in any order they like, and the study of phonology begins with the same observation for the consonants and vowels (the segments) of a word. Thus, tra is a possible segmental sequence in an English syllable, while rta is not. Vowel harmony, in languages that have it, is a set of restrictions that determine the possible and impossible sequences of vowels within a word. These cooccurrence restrictions are largely based on the principle of dividing the vowels of the language into two sets—let’s call them ‘‘even vowels’’ and ‘‘odd vowels’’ for now—and ensuring that no mixing and matching of vowels from the even set and the odd set can occur in the same word. Thus, in the idealized vowel harmony language, the only permissible words would be those containing only even vowels (e.g., 2426) or only odd vowels (e.g., 1153). The example with ‘‘even’’ and ‘‘odd,’’ while formally very close to how vowel harmony works, is analogical. In reality, a vowel harmony language divides its inventory of vowels into two sets along some phonetic/ phonological dimension. For example, one articulatory parameter that divides vowels up neatly is whether they are pronounced with the body of the tongue aimed toward the front or the back of the mouth. In Turkish , the front vowels /i,ü,e,ö/ cannot mix with the back vowels /ı,u,a,o/ within the same word if it is to be considered ‘‘harmonic.’’ Even when su‰xes pile up, they keep to this restriction. Consider the word formed by adding the following thirteen su‰xes to the root Avrupa ‘Europe’: (1) Avrupa- lı- laş- tır- a- ma- yacak- lar- ımız- dan- mıEurope - from- become- caus- abil- neg- fut- pl- 1pl- abl- qy - dı- nız cop- past- 2pl ‘Were you one of those whom we are not going to be able to turn into Europeans?’ Avrupa has vowels in which the tongue is pulled back, and owing to harmonization , all thirteen su‰xes have the tongue body pulled back as well. By contrast, if the last vowel in the root is a front vowel, like the /i/ in Akdeniz ‘Mediterranean’, all thirteen su‰xes have front vowels. (2) Akdeniz- li- leş- tir- e- me- yecek- ler- imiz- denMediterranean from- become- caus- abil- neg- fut- pl- 1pl- ablmi - y- di- niz q- cop- past- 2pl ‘Were you one of those whom we are not going to be able to turn into Mediterraneans?’ Like the phonotactic restrictions banning certain sequences of consonants in some languages but not others (e.g., rta is disallowed in English but allowed in Russian), the restrictions banning certain sequences of vowels are subject to language-specific variation. But the restrictions governing possible orders and combinations of vowels within a word rest on completely di¤erent sets of principles than those related to consonants. This is because, for one, the articulatory dimensions along which these ‘‘harmonic sets’’ can be divided require a certain degree of symmetry among the vowels in a language (witness Turkish, with four back and four front vowels); the instantiation of harmony from one language to the next may di¤er because not every language has a perfectly balanced vowel inventory. Furthermore, the description of the syntax of vowel sequences is more complicated than that of consonant sequences in large part because vowels are rarely strictly adjacent to one another; the resulting cooccurrence restrictions become a type of ‘‘action at a distance,’’ unlike the strictly local rules dictating that t cannot immediately follow r at the beginning of a word. Vowel harmony is one of the only phonotactic processes across human languages that consistently instantiates a longdistance relationship. 2...