Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Harmony of the spheres'

Doctorat en Philosophie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation focuses on vowel harmony in Maasai, an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in Kenya and Tanzania. The main goal of this dissertation is to determine whether an adequate account of the Maasai pattern of Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) harmony can be formulated in Optimality Theory. Ultimately it is seen that it can, relying on directional Maximal Licensing constraints Walker (2011). Maasai is a language with dominant-recessive harmony. There are two sets of vowels—ATR and non-ATR. A word can only include members of one vowel set; if there is an AT R vowel anywhere in a word, all vowels will be ATR in the output. The only exception to this is the non-ATR low vowel, which lacks an ATR counterpart. It is opaque—it does not harmonize and it blocks the spread of harmony if it is followed by an ATR vowel, but it harmonizes to [o] when preceded by an ATR vowel.

All earlier analyses have been based on mainly one source, Tucker and Mpaayei (1955). To avoid using inaccurate or inaccurate data, the data analyzed in this thesis were collected from native speakers in Arusha, Tanzania. Earlier accounts have been based on impressionistic transcriptions. Acoustic analysis of the data were performed to explore the properties of the vowels. The height of the first formant was found to be the most robust acoustical cue to differentiate ATR and non-ATR vowels, though the height of the second formant has some use as a secondary cue. Like many previous studies of languages with an ATR contrast, in this study, it was found that the ATR vowels in Maasai have lower F1s than their non-ATR counterparts (Ladefoged 1964, Lindau et al. 1972, Lindau 1976, Jacobson 1980, Hess 1992, Maddieson and Gordon 1996, Fulop et al. 1998, Anderson 1999, 2007, Przezdziecki 2005, Gick et al. 2006, Starwalk 2008, Kang and Ko 2012). Guion (2004)'s acoustic analysis of Maasai, which showed that ATR and non-ATR vowels in minimal pairs or near minimal pairs differ in F1 was confirmed. Unlike previous research, vowels that have undergone harmony were also investigated. It was observed that not only does Maasai show an ATR/ non-ATR distinction, but that the harmony process is neutralizing. An ATR suffix will force a non-ATR root to harmonize, and an ATR root will force a non-ATR prefix to harmonize. The vowel that has undergone harmony to become ATR is not distinguishable from one is always ATR. It was also found that distance from the trigger (the ATR vowel that causes harmony) does not affect the harmony process.

Maasai has been described as having one lexically ATR prefix which causes only less peripheral prefixes to harmonize (Tucker and Mpaayei 1955, Mol 1995, 1996). This claim was investigated, but no acoustic evidence was found to support the claim that there is an ATR prefix. Instead, it is suggested that the perception of the prefix as ATR arises from coarticulatory effects that are the result of the unique environment of the prefix. Acoustic analysis of prefixes preceding the putative ATR prefix were found to be non-ATR.

Although previous OT analyses of Maasai have been either unduly complex, incapable of accounting for all the data or have dismissed elements of the harmony as morphological, the harmony system can be accounted for rather simply with two directional harmony constraints. Walker (2011) suggests that languages which appear to demonstrate one bidirectional harmony process might actually be the result of two unidirectional harmony processes. The analysis of Maasai presented her supports this suggestion. There are two directional Maximal Licensing constraints which are high-ranked there is another constraint that must be ranked between them to account for the asymmetric behavior of the low vowel.

Vowel harmony has been of great interest in phonological research. It has been widely accepted that vowel harmony is a phonetically natural phenomenon, which means that it is a common pattern because it provides advantages to the speaker in articulation and to the listener in perception.

Exceptional patterns proved to be a challenge to the phonetically grounded analysis as they, by their nature, introduce phonetically disadvantageous sequences to the surface form, that consist of harmonically different vowels. Such forms are found, for example in the Finnish stem tuoli 'chair' or in the Hungarian suffixed form hi:d-hoz 'to the bridge', both word forms containing a mix of front and back vowels. There has recently been evidence shown that there might be a phonetic level explanation for some exceptional patterns, as the possibility that some vowels participating in irregular stems (like the vowel [i] in the Hungarian stem hi:d 'bridge' above) differ in some small phonetic detail from vowels in regular stems. The main question has not been raised, though: does this phonetic detail matter for speakers? Would they use these minor differences when they have to categorize a new word as regular or irregular?

A different recent trend in explaining morphophonological exceptionality by looking at the phonotactic regularities characteristic of classes of stems based on their morphological behavior. Studies have shown that speakers are aware of these regularities, and use them as cues when they have to decide what class a novel stem belongs to. These sublexical phonotactic regularities have already been shown to be present in some exceptional patterns vowel harmony, but many questions remain open: how is learning the static generalization linked to learning the allomorph selection facet of vowel harmony? How much does the effect of consonants on vowel harmony matter, when compared to the effect of vowel-to-vowel correspondences?

This dissertation aims to test these two ideas --- that speakers use phonetic cues and/or that they use sublexical phonotactic regularities in categorizing stems as regular or irregular --- and attempt to answer the more detailed questions, like the effect of consonantal patterns on exceptional patterns or the link between allomorph selection and static phonotactic generalizations as well. The phonetic hypothesis is tested on the Hungarian antiharmonicity pattern (stems with front vowels consistently selecting back suffixes, like in the example hi:d-hoz 'to the bridge' above), and the results indicate that while there may be some small phonetic differences between vowels in regular and irregular stems, speakers do not use these, or even enhanced differences when they have to categorize stems.

The sublexical hypothesis is tested and confirmed by looking at the disharmonicity pattern in Finnish. In Finnish, stems that contain both back and certain front vowels are frequent and perfectly grammatical, like in the example tuoli 'chair' above, while the mixing of back and some other front vowels is very rare and mostly confined to loanwords like amatøøri 'amateur'. It will be seen that speakers do use sublexical phonotactic regularities to decide on the acceptability of novel stems, but certain patterns that are phonetically or phonologically more natural (vowel-to-vowel correspondences) seem to matter much more than other effects (like consonantal effects).

Finally, a computational account will be given on how exceptionality might be learned by speakers by using maximum entropy grammars available in the literature to simulate the acquisition of the Finnish disharmonicity pattern. It will be shown that in order to clearly model the overall behavior on the exact pattern, the learner has to have access not only to the lexicon, but also to the allomorph selection patterns in the language.

ATR, advanced tongue root, is a phonological feature among vowels. As vowels assimilate to share the same value of that feature, they display ATR harmony. This is a common phenomenon among many African languages. ATR harmony is examined in this paper as manifested across morpheme boundaries wihin nouns in a Surmic language of Ethiopia called Bale. The data presented was collected at a workshop on ATR harmony held by SIL International in Mizan Teferi, Ethiopia, 2009. The vowel system in Bale displays a nine vowel inventory with a feature dominance of [+ATR] vowels which spread their feature both leftward and rightward to recessive [–ATR] vowels. The [+ATR] dominance is also present as a floating feature without any phonological material. The vowel /a/ is analysed as a neutral vowel, co-occuring with both [+ATR] and [–ATR] vowels within roots.