Abstract
Many analyses of vowel harmony derive neutrality by making use of a lack of harmonic counterpart, treating neutrality as equivalent to lack of contrast. This paper considers a case in which this equivalence is false: in Mayak and Kurmuk, both Western Nilotic languages of the Burun subfamily, [a] is neutral to ATR harmony, despite having a counterpart [ʌ] that is permitted in the contexts in which [a] fails to harmonize. In Mayak, [ʌ] is neutral as a harmony trigger, while in Kurmuk, it is not. Moreover, while mid vowels are not contrastive for ATR in these languages, they do harmonize. While these patterns have been described before in Andersen (1999) and Andersen (2007), their implications have not previously been examined within the theoretical literature. Here, I consider them in detail, arguing that there are factors independent of contrast that make low vowels poor targets of ATR harmony and showing that the analysis of Mayak and Kurmuk is impossible if neutrality depends on contrast, but straightforward if we can impose target conditions within the harmony constraints. I consider the implications of such a pattern to the role of contrast in neutrality, proposing that these concepts are fundamentally divorced, but that the same factors that contribute to loss of contrast may also contribute to neutrality.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
All data comes from existing, published primary sources.
Code Availability
N/A.
Notes
It is worth clarifying that this match between neutrality and lack of contrast is known to be complicated by factors like similarity. While generally not considered together with other types of neutrality, parasitic harmony is a well-known phenomenon in which harmony occurs only among segments that agree in some other feature. It is particularly established in rounding harmony, in which harmony often occurs only among vowels that agree in height (Kaun 1995, 2004). While this is acknowledged in the existing literature, there remains an underlying assumption in many works that there is a relatively tight connection between neutrality and lack of contrast, and so it remains useful to challenge this assumption through considering the data from Mayak and Kurmuk.
The data under analysis in the present paper comes from Andersen (1999) for Mayak and Andersen (2007) for Kurmuk. I follow these papers in referring to the Mayak pattern and the Kurmuk pattern. However, as pointed out by a reviewer, language communities are not homogenous, and there may be variation within both speech communities that is not documented. As such, the contrast in these harmony systems may not be a contrast between Mayak and Kurmuk as languages, but rather different aspects of the pool of variation in these two languages. I will nonetheless refer to these patterns by the language names.
The facts relevant to harmony are symmetric across short and long vowels, so for notational ease, I mention only the short vowels in the prose about the facts (but will use examples with both short and long vowels).
It is unclear if the table documenting this in Andersen (1999) is specifically about roots or about all disyllabic words.
Examples of harmony alternations in this paper are all between a root and a suffix; there are no examples of harmony between suffixes.
Of course, it is possible that this is non-phonological allomorphy, but given the phonetic description of the vowels as low and differing only in ATR/RTR, as well as the fact that ATR in the stem conditions the choice of allomorph, it is a better explanation to claim that this is exceptional ATR harmony, with the two low vowels constituting a pair.
The details of the triggering of this morphological process are beyond the scope of the present paper, since they are clearly independent from ATR harmony.
This idea of certain vowels being more neutral than others means that neutrality is treated in a scalar sense here. This concept is similar to what has been found in Hungarian, in which higher front unrounded vowels are more neutral than lower ones, in terms of transparency, invariant suffixes, and anti-harmonic stems (e.g. Törkenczy 2010). Already, scalar neutrality is an issue that cannot be captured in a standard contrast-based account of neutrality, where vowels are either contrastive or not and either neutral or not. For a theoretical analysis of the scalar neutrality in Hungarian, see Ozburn (2019).
“Re-pairing” is a term from Baković (2000), referring to a pattern that occurs when a vowel without a harmonic counterpart instead pairs (i.e. alternates harmonically) with a vowel from which it differs in an additional feature.
It is worth noting that some 2IU languages, such as Turkana, also have instances of ATR to RTR changes triggered by RTR vowels, as in /E-rem-I-A-rε/ → [ε-rεm-ε-rε] ‘3.sg-spear-v-subj’ (Noske 1996). However, Turkana’s harmony system, like that of most 2IU languages, primarily consists of RTR to ATR changes.
Since [RTR] could also be understood as [-ATR], this division of TR faithfulness essentially means that there are separate faithfulness constraints for two different values of a feature. However, this approach has precedent in the literature on harmony systems; for instance, Rose and Walker (2004) adopt Ident-IO[F] and Ident-OI[F] constraints in their analysis of consonant harmony. Ident-IO[RTR] in the present analysis is equivalent to Ident-OI[ATR] in that framework.
This is the type of pattern that Stratal OT or Lexical Phonology could deal with straightforwardly, by having the phonemic inventory defined at the Stem stratum, where *eo is high ranked, and harmony existing only at the Word stratum, where Ident-IO[ATR] would outrank *eo. This multi-level approach would mean that the “input” to harmony at the Word stratum would not contain /e,o/, since they have been eliminated from outputs at the Stem stratum. As I adopt a non-derivational approach here, this type of multi-level analysis is not possible in the present framework. It is also possible to deal with this type of pattern in McCarthy’s Comparative Markedness (2003), with “old markedness” ≫ faithfulness ≫ “new markedness”; this approach was built for cases similar to this one, but again is a different framework from what I adopt here.
Note that this is only true for some cases of markedness hierarchies, since epenthetic segments also have markedness hierarchies, but are not faithful to any input material.
Thank you to a reviewer for pointing out this possible alternative analysis.
Pater (2016) in fact presents arguments in favour of Harmonic Grammar (HG), which cannot account for the pattern discussed here. The full argument is beyond the scope of the present paper, but essentially, since each constraint violated by [ε…ɪ] must be outranked/outweighed by a constraint violated by [e…i], there is no viable way to rank/weight constraints to construct a gang effect in which the latter form wins.
However, it is worth noting that if there were some need to change ATR in a combination of high ATR and non-high ATR vowels, then everything else being equal, even this ranking would predict that the non-high ones should be unfaithful. Whether such situations exist and how they behave is unclear; harmony is not a context in which this issue would arise.
Of course, this also assumes that faithfulness to non-TR height features also outranks *eo, so that harmony does not turn a mid vowel into a high or low vowel.
While these constraints seem like they import focus and context from generative rewrite rules, they are in fact classic markedness constraints; *[RTR]C0[ATR] can be satisfied by changing either the RTR vowel or the ATR one. It is only the ranking of Ident-IO[ATR] ≫ Ident-IO[RTR] that results in the RTR vowel behaving as the target and the ATR vowel as the trigger.
The critical point here is simply that an ATR mid vowel will not surface in this context; the proposed analysis predicts that such a hypothetical form would surface with an RTR mid vowel, but there is no available evidence from these languages to know whether this prediction (as opposed to changes in other features like height) is correct.
Of course, there can be differences in suitability depending on morpheme affiliation; in Mayak, for instance, the regressive/progressive differences align with root/suffix distinctions. As a reviewer points out, morphological complexity and word length can play a role, with a lot of progressive harmony in morphologically complex Southern Nilotic languages (see Dimmendaal 2002).
Note that this differs from (38), where *eo ruled out harmony to a mid vowel suffix, instead of treating mid and low vowels in suffixes in the same way. Since I treat the alternating low vowel suffix as exceptional, all non-high suffix vowels behave the same way, but the analysis does not unify them: it uses *eo to eliminate mid vowel alternations and a target condition on the harmony constraint to eliminate low vowel ones. A high ranking of the *eo constraint is independently necessary in Mayak to prevent ATR mid vowels from occurring except as the result of regressive harmony; this constraint already does the work of preventing mid vowel suffix alternations, so there is no need to assume target differentiation for mid vowels. This analysis is not possible for low vowels, which are contrastive. The result is that the exclusion of mid and low vowels from progressive harmony is due to different reasons, but those separate reasons are consistent with the independent behaviours of mid versus low vowels elsewhere in the language (inventory and regressive harmony).
We might look for such cases from loanwords from languages with contrastive /e,o/, but unfortunately, loanword data is not available for Mayak and Kurmuk. We might think that the historical changes could provide evidence for the behaviour of such underlying situations, given the merger of Proto-Nilotic ATR mid vowels with RTR high vowels in Mayak and Kurmuk (Andersen 1999, 2007). However, given this available data, this merger appears to have been complete with respect to the phonological harmony system, in that these vowels behave as RTR and high.
The other difference is the morphological process triggered by some Class 3 suffixes in Kurmuk, which neutralizes certain root contrasts. This is beyond the scope of the paper and also occurs with some Mayak alternating suffixes.
As a reviewer points out, it is in fact questionable whether such exceptions should be considered part of the phonology at all; we may need to treat them as morphologically conditioned exceptions that are memorized.
The generalizations described here apply solely to ATR-dominant harmony, of the type found primarily in Eastern Africa and especially in Nilo-Saharan languages. Other types of tongue root harmony, including that of many Western African Niger-Congo languages as well as the systems in Northeast Asia, show distinct patterns of participation. For example, Classical Manchu has a low ATR/RTR pair [ə,a], but [i] is unpaired and neutral to harmony (Li 1996). It is beyond the scope of the present paper to examine why different types of tongue root harmony show distinct patterns of participation and diachronic loss of contrasts, though it may relate to which feature is active (ATR versus RTR) or to differences in which phonetic correlates are used to express tongue root contrasts. In any case, a distinction between types of TR harmony must be drawn, and the generalizations discussed here are about ATR dominant harmony.
The term “ATR-dominant” is not without controversy, as not all literature agrees with this way of referring to a system; some instead argue that ATR is always the dominant feature in tongue root harmony (van der Hulst and van de Weijer 1995; Baković 2000; see also Casali 2003:308 on “universal [+ATR] dominance” theories). However, it is clear that there is a distinction between “2IU” languages (those with a tongue root contrast among high vowels) and “1IU” languages (those with no such contrast), and to some extent also between Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo languages, in the way in which the tongue root harmony systems operate. Nilo-Saharan languages in particular are biased towards 2IU systems and it is “characteristic” of them to show the asymmetry in which ATR acts like a dominant value (Casali 2008:515).
Thank you to Michael Kenstowicz, the associate editor for this paper, for this observation.
Note that “lack of ATR contrast” means different things in mid versus high vowels, in terms of which vowels are in the inventory. For mid vowels, a lack of contrast means that only RTR ones are in the contrastive inventory, whereas for high vowels, a lack of contrast means that only ATR ones are present.
It is worth noting that Nevins (2010:194) also suggests that low vowels are special in RTR harmony, specifically in Yoruba, due to their sonority. As noted previously, the facts are different for types of ATR harmony besides ATR-dominant harmony, including RTR harmony of the type seen in Yoruba and the TR harmony seen in Northeast Asia. These issues are beyond the scope of the present paper.
References
Allen, Blake, Douglas Pulleyblank, and Ọládiípò Ajíbóyè. 2013. Articulatory mapping of Yoruba vowels: An ultrasound study. Phonology 30: 183–210.
Andersen, Torben. 1987. An outline of Lulubo phonology. Studies in African Linguistics 18(1): 39–66.
Andersen, Torben. 1992. Aspects of Mabaan tonology. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 13: 183–204.
Andersen, Torben. 1999. Vowel harmony and vowel alternation in Mayak (Western Nilotic). Studies in African Linguistics 28(1): 1–30.
Andersen, Torben. 2004. Jumjum phonology. Studies in African Linguistics 33(2): 133–162.
Andersen, Torben. 2007. Kurmuk phonology. Studies in African Linguistics 36(1): 30–90.
Archangeli, Diana, and Douglas Pulleyblank. 1994. Grounded phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Archangeli, Diana, and Douglas Pulleyblank. 2002. Kinande vowel harmony: Domains, grounded conditions and one-sided alignment. Phonology 19(2): 139–188. https://doi.org/10.1017/S095267570200430.
Baković, Eric. 2000. Harmony, dominance and control. PhD diss., Rutgers The State University of New Jersey.
Becker-Kristal, Roy. 2010. Acoustic typology of vowel inventories and Dispersion Theory: Insights from a large cross-linguistic corpus. PhD diss., UCLA.
Benus, Stefan, and Adamantios Gafos. 2007. Articulatory characteristics of Hungarian transparent vowels. Journal of Phonetics 35(3): 271–300. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2006.11.002.
Casali, Roderic. 2003. [ATR] value asymmetries and underlying vowel inventory structure in Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan. Linguistic Typology 7: 307–382.
Casali, Roderic. 2008. ATR harmony in African languages. Language and Linguistics Compass 2/3: 496–549.
Casali, Roderic. 2016. Some inventory-related asymmetries in the patterning of tongue root harmony systems. Studies in African Linguistics 45: 95–140.
De Lacy, Paul. 2004. Markedness conflation in optimality theory. Phonology 21(2): 145–199. https://doi.org/10.1017/S095267570400019.
Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. 2002. Constraining disharmony in Nilotic: What does an optimal system look like? Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 23(2): 153–182.
Dresher, B. Elan. 2009. The contrastive hierarchy in phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edmondson, Jerold A., and John H. Esling. 2006. The valves of the throat and their functioning in tone, vocal register and stress: Laryngoscopic case studies. Phonology 23(2): 157–191.
Fulop, Sean, Ethelbert Kari, and Peter Ladefoged. 1998. An acoustic study of tongue root contrast in Degema vowels. Phonetica 55: 80–98.
Gafos, Adamantios. 1999. The articulatory basis of locality in phonology. New York: Garland.
Gick, Byran, Douglas Pulleyblank, Fiona Campbell, and Ngessimo Mutaka. 2006. Low vowels and transparency in Kinande vowel harmony. Phonology 23(1): 1–20.
Hall, Beatrice L., and R. M. R. Hall. 1980. Nez Perce vowel harmony: An Africanist explanation and some theoretical questions. In Issues in vowel harmony, ed. Robert Vago, 201–236. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hall, R. M. R., and Chet A. Creider. 1998. The fates of [+ATR] /a/ in Nilotic. In Language history and linguistic description in Africa, eds. Ian Maddieson and Thomas J. Hinnebusch, 45–54. Trenton, NJ and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press.
Hansson, Gunnar Ó. 2001. Theoretical and typological issues in consonant harmony. PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley
Hansson, Gunnar Ó. 2008. Effects of contrast recoverability on the typology of harmony systems. In Contrast in phonology: Theory, perception, acquisition, eds. Peter Avery, B. Elan Dresher, and Keren Rice, 115–141. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Hansson, Gunnar Ó. 2010. Consonant harmony: Long-distance interaction in phonology, Vol. 145. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Howe, Darin, and Douglas Pulleyblank. 2004. Harmonic scales as faithfulness. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue Canadienne de Linguistique 49(1): 1–49.
Hyman, Larry M. 2002. Is there a right-to-left bias in vowel harmony? Ms., University of California, Berkeley.
Inkelas, Sharon, and Cemil O. Orgun. 1995. Level ordering and economy in the lexical phonology of Turkish. Language 71(4): 763–793.
Jacobson, Leon. 1980. Voice-quality harmony in Western Nilotic languages. In Issues in vowel harmony 6, ed. Robert Vago, 183–200. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jackson, Michel. 1988. Phonetic theory and cross-linguistic variation in vowel articulation. PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles.
Jurgec, Peter, and Bronwyn M. Bjorkman. 2018. Indexation to stems and words. Phonology 35(4): 577–615.
Kaun, Abigail R. 1995. The typology of rounding harmony: An Optimality Theoretic approach. PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles.
Kaun, Abigail. 2004. The typology of rounding harmony. In Phonetically based phonology, eds. Bruce Hayes, Robert Kirchner, and Donca Steriade, 87–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kenstowicz, Michael. 2009. Two notes on the phonetics and phonology of Kinande vowel harmony. Language Sciences 31: 248–270.
Kimper, Wendell A. 2011. Competing triggers: Transparency and opacity in vowel harmony. PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Kiparsky, Paul, and Karl Pajusalu. 2003. Towards a typology of disharmony. The Linguistic Review 20: 217–241. https://doi.org/10.1515/tlir.2003.009.
Kutsch Lojenga, Constance. 1991. Vowel harmony in Alur: On the crossroads of two systems. In Proceedings of the Third Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, eds. Franz Rottland and Lucia N. Omondi, 131–141. Hamburg: Dietrich Reimer.
Li, Bing. 1996. Tungusic vowel harmony: Description and analysis. Amsterdam: Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics.
Lindau, Mona. 1987. Tongue mechanisms in Akan and Luo. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 68: 46–57.
Lindau, Mona E., and Peter Ladefoged. 1986. Variability of feature specifications. In Invariance and variability in speech processes, eds. Joseph S. Perkell and Dennis H. Klatt, 464–479. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Lindau, Mona E., Leon Jacobson, and Peter Ladefoged. 1972. The feature advanced tongue root. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 22: 76–94.
Lodge, Ken. 1995. Kalenjin phonology and morphology: A further exemplification of underspecification and non-destructive phonology. Lingua 96(1): 29–43.
Mackenzie, Sara. 2009. Contrast and similarity in consonant harmony processes. PhD diss., University of Toronto.
McCarthy, John J. 2003. Comparative markedness. Theoretical Linguistics 29(1–2): 1–51.
Nevins, Andrew. 2010. Locality in Vowel Harmony. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Noonan, Michael. 1992. A grammar of Lango. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Noske, Manuela. 1996. [ATR] harmony in Turkana. Studies in African Linguistics 25(1): 61–99.
Ozburn, Avery. 2019. A target-oriented approach to neutrality in vowel harmony: Evidence from Hungarian. Glossa: A. Journal of General Linguistics 4(1): 1–36. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.681. Article 47.
Parker, Kirk. 1985. Baka phonology. Occasional Papers in the Study of Sudanese Languages 4: 63–85.
Pater, Joe. 2016. Universal grammar with weighted constraints. In Harmonic grammar and harmonic serialism, eds. John J. McCarthy and Joe Pater, 1–46. London: Equinox Publishing.
Potts, Christopher, Joe Pater, Karen Jesney, Rajesh Bhatt, and Michael Becker. 2010. Harmonic Grammar with linear programming: From linear systems to linguistic typology. Phonology 27(1): 77–117. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675710000047.
Prince, Alan, and Paul Smolensky. 2004. Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Malden: Blackwell.
Przezdziecki, Marek A. 2005. Vowel harmony and coarticulation in three dialects of Yoruba: Phonetics determining phonology. PhD diss., Cornell University.
Pulleyblank, Douglas. 2004. Harmony drivers: No disagreement allowed. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, eds. Julie Larson and Mary Paster, 249–267. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v28i1.3841.
Pulleyblank, Douglas, Ping Jiang-King, Myles Leitch, and Nike Ola. 1995. Typological variation through constraint rankings: Low vowels in tongue root harmony. In Proceedings of the South Western Optimality Theory Workshop. The University of Arizona Coyote Papers, 184–208.
Quinn-Wriedt, Lindsey. 2013. Vowel harmony in Maasai. PhD diss., University of Iowa.
Ringen, Catherine, and Robert M. Vago. 1998. Hungarian vowel harmony in Optimality Theory. Phonology 15(3): 393–416.
Rose, Sharon. 2018. ATR Vowel Harmony: New patterns and diagnostics. In Proceedings of the 2017 Annual Meeting on Phonology, eds. Gillian Gallagher, Maria Gouskova, and Sora Heng Yin, 1–12. Washington: Linguistic Society of America.
Rose, Sharon, and Rachel Walker. 2004. A typology of consonant agreement as correspondence. Language 80(3): 475–531.
Rose, Sharon, Michael Obiri-Yeboah, and Sarah Creel. 2019. Perception of ATR vowel contrasts by Akan speakers. Talk presented at the 50th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, University of British Columbia
Sasa, Tomomasa. 2009. Treatments of vowel harmony in Optimality Theory. PhD diss., University of Iowa.
Starwalt, Coleen. 2008. The acoustic correlates of ATR harmony in seven- and nine-vowel African languages: A phonetic inquiry into phonological structure. PhD diss., University of Texas, Arlington.
Steinberger, Kathy E., and Robert Vago. 1987. A multileveled autosegmental analysis of vowel harmony in Bari. In Current approaches to African linguistics, ed. David Odden, 357–368.
Tiede, Mark K. 1996. An MRI-based study of pharyngeal volume contrasts in Akan and English. Journal of Phonetics 24: 399–421.
Törkenczy, Miklós. 2010. Hungarian vowel harmony. In The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, eds. Marc van Oostendorp, Colin Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren Rice, 2963–2989. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
van der Hulst, Harry. 2016. Vowel harmony. Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics, ed. Mark Aronoff. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.38.
van der Hulst, Harry, and Jeroen van de Weijer. 1995. Vowel harmony. In The handbook of phonological theory, ed. John Goldsmith, 495–534. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Walker, Rachel. 2005. Weak triggers in vowel harmony. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 23: 917–989.
Walker, Rachel. 2018. Feature identity and icy targets in Menominee vowel harmony. In Hana-bana: A festchrift for Junko Ito and Armin Mester, eds. Ryan Bennet, Andrew Angeles, Adrian Brasoveanu, Dhyana Buckley, Nick Kalivoda, Shigeto Kawahara, Grant McGuire, and Jaye Padgett, 1–26. Santa Cruz: University of California.
Woock, Edith Bavin, and Michael Noonan. 1979. Vowel harmony in Lango. In Papers from the 15th Regional Meeting of Chicago Linguistics Society, Vol. 15, 20–29.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Gunnar Hansson, Douglas Pulleyblank, Anne-Michelle Tessier, and Sharon Rose for feedback on an earlier version of this paper that was part of my dissertation. I would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the Associate Editor, Michael Kenstowicz, for their comments.
Funding
This research was supported in part by Insight Development Grant 430-2021-00176 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflicts of interest/Competing interests
The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ozburn, A. Neutral paired vowels in Mayak and Kurmuk. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 40, 1269–1315 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-021-09533-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-021-09533-y