We have a guest speaker this Friday.
Speaker: Peter Jurgec, Leiden University (http://www.jurgec.net/)
Title: Unifying vowel and consonant harmony
Time: Friday Feb. 1st, 3pm.
A reception will follow in the lounge.
Place: Sid Smith 560A (ground floor)
(Sid Smith is located at 100 St. George St.)
Abstract:
Recent phonological literature sees vowel and consonant harmony as
fundamentally different. Whereas vowel harmony is attributed to feature
spreading, consonant harmony instead involves a long-distance relationship
between consonants. Such a formal distinction may appear warranted as
consonant harmony (i) is found only with some features and (ii) invariantly
affects a subset of consonants; vowel harmony does not display these gaps.
In this talk, I argue that both phenomena can nevertheless be analyzed as
feature spreading. I relate the first gap in consonant harmony to a general
tendency for assimilation to target syllable nuclei (i.e. vowels). This
tendency can be captured by modified alignment constraints. The second gap
suggests that consonant harmony is dependent on another consonant feature.
A strikingly similar pattern is found in parasitic vowel harmony. I capture
such parasitic preference by agreement constraints, which apply to vowel
and consonant harmony. This approach correctly predicts that vowel harmony
can be parasitic or not, whereas consonant harmony is always parasitic.
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