The Development of Stress-Dependent Harmony

Abstract. This paper seeks to further establish the connection between phonological vowel harmony and phonetic vowel-to-vowel coarticulation by examining the role of stress in each. A surprising number of languages have vowel harmonies in which unstressed vowels assimilate to stressed vowels. It is argued that these vowel harmonies are the result of the phonologization of a stress asymmetry present in the vowel-to-vowel coarticulation of precursor languages. Experimental results indicate that unstressed vowels have a tendency to undergo greater vowel-to-vowel influences than their stressed counterparts. The results of a perception test confirm that the effects observed on the unstressed English vowel /i/ are great enough to be perceived, and a model of how a language would develop a stress-dependent harmony from a stress asymmetry in vowel-to-vowel coarticulation is put forward. I. INTRODUCTION. Many of the world's languages have a phonological process known as vowel harmony, which in its most general form, involves a long distant process of assimilation where certain features of the vowels within a word are restricted to one or another set of values for a given phonological feature. Languages differ greatly in which phonological feature is restricted and in precisely how that feature value is determined. Very often, vowel harmony proceeds from word roots and spreads onto affix vowels so that the vowel of a given affix is determined by the quality of the root vowels. A surprisingly large number of languages contain harmonies that are triggered by a stressed vowel and manifested on unstressed vowels. Such STRESS-DEPENDENT HARMONIES (SDH) can be found in languages representing a wide range of language families as well as differing phonological feature restrictions. To demonstrate the range of these types of harmonies, a few examples are given below. Languages have been chosen to represent VII with varying phonological feature restrictions. 1.1 Pasiego Montanes Height Harmony. The first example of a SDH comes from the well-known height harmony of the Pasiego Montanes dialect of Spanish spoken in northwestern Spain (Penny 1969a, 1969b). In this harmony, non-low, unstressed vowels agree in height with the stressed vowel of the word. Data illustrating this harmony is shown in (1). (1) /beb/ 'drink' bi' b-i:s 'you (pl.) drink' be'b-er 'to drink' be'b-amus 'we drink (sub.)' These forms contain variants of the morpheme /beb/ 'drink'. The stressed vowels of each of these words appear on a suffixal vowel and alternations appear on the root. If the stressed suffixal vowel is high, as in bi' b-i:s, the root vowel is also high but if the stressed vowel is mid as in be'b-er, the root vowel is also mid. The third example contains a stressed vowel that is low and in this case, the harmony does not apply so the underlying form emerges (Penny 1969a). 1.2. Eastern Cheremis Palatal Harmony. Eastern Cheremis, spoken in eastern Russia, contains a stress-dependent harmony in which word final mid vowels agree in the features [round] and [back] with the stressed vowel of the word. The alternations in (2), taken from Sebeok and Ingemann (1961), illustrate this phenomenon. (2) -[??]e ~ -[??]o ~ [??]o 'third singular possessive' (a) 'kit-[??]e 'his hand' (b) '[??]p-[??]o 'his hair' (c) 'surt-[??]o 'his house' These examples all contain a form of the third singular possessive suffix, whose mid vowel alternates according to the frontness and rounding of the stressed vowel. The form in(a) contains only front, unround vowels, (b) contains only front, round vowels, and(c) contains back, round vowels. This harmony is not limited to suffixal vowels as monomorphemic words abide by the same harmonic restriction. One interesting characteristic of the Eastern Cheremis vowel harmony is that the extremely reduced vowel [[? …