Seyyed Mohammad Razinejad
Abstract
Harmony and disharmony are generally considered in isolation in the phonological literature. This has led to a striking asymmetry in their analyses. In this article, it is argued that ...
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Harmony and disharmony are generally considered in isolation in the phonological literature. This has led to a striking asymmetry in their analyses. In this article, it is argued that both phenomena call for a parallel treatment and that this can be accomplished within Correspondence Theory.Correspondence Theory provides a general framework for defining faithfulness constraints. What happens in vowel harmony or any kind of assimilation is intuitively the same as what is encoded in one of the basic faithfulness constraint families of OT: IDENTITY(f) says that segments in one representation (usually input) should agree in feature specifications with correspoding segments in another representation (usually output). Here there is surface or syntagmatic correspondence relations between two distinct elements within one representation, that is, vowels in adjacent syllables in roundness and backness in surface representation.Following Inkelas’ (1994) theory of under specification, the approach divides harmony systems into structure changing and structure filling harmony types. Features participating in vowel harmony are underspecified in lexicon and are specified based on correspondence relations with adjacent features in output. All disharmonic features are specified in lexicon and do not change based on structure filling harmony.
