Position-sensitive transparency in vowel harmony: The role of prosodic gestures and locality

A recent crosslinguistic study of positional privilege in vowel harmony observed that vowels in a stressed syllable may asymmetrically block harmony, but they are never singled out to be transparent (Kaplan & Walker 2024). This typological gap is not predicted under traditional theoretical assumptions in Optimality Theory. If transparent vowels are skipped by harmony, then a pattern is predicted in which harmony operates among unstressed vowels but skips stressed vowels to preserve content in the stressed syllable. This unwanted pattern is derived when a positional faithfulness constraint designated for the stressed syllable (Beckman 1999) and a harmony imperative constraint are enforced at the cost of the constraint that penalizes vowels that are skipped by harmony: ˈσ-Faithfulness >> Harmony Imperative >> *Skip.

This talk employs the representations of gestural phonology (Browman & Goldstein 1986, 1995) to address this unwanted prediction, centering on two points. First, harmony does not actually skip vowels, so transparent vowels have overlapping (co-active) opposing gestures. “Transparency” results when the goal state of the harmonizing gesture is not achieved due to blending with a co-active opposing gesture (Gafos & Benus 2006, Smith 2018). Second, stressed vowels resist transparency because they are a locus of hyperarticulation due to a prosodic µ-gesture associated with stress (Saltzman et al. 2008, Katsika & Tsai 2021), a context that disfavors opposing gestures.

An analysis is developed in Optimality Theory. The proposal is illustrated in application to vowel laxing/RTR harmony in the Eastern Andalusian Spanish variety of Granada (Jiménez & Lloret 2007, 2020, Lloret & Jiménez 2009), in which unstressed vowels may be transparent but stressed vowels consistently harmonize. In addition to empirically demonstrating issues surrounding positional asymmetries in vowel harmony, three patterns of variation in the harmony pattern of Eastern Andalusian Spanish are examined and analyzed in the gestural account.

This study has implications for phonological representations, locality, and position-sensitive constraints. Building on previous gestural approaches to harmony, it provides a new argument for understanding spreading in harmony as a local operation, and it offers support for gestural representations in phonology through examining interactions of vocal tract constriction gestures and prosodic gestures. In terms of the treatment of privileged positions, it argues that stress-sensitive transparency and blocking be understood as an effect of positional markedness rather than positional faithfulness, contributing a new argument to work identifying disadvantages of positional faithfulness in handling various aspects of positional privilege (e.g. Hayes 2004, Prince & Tesar 2004, Jesney 2009).

Location: Royce Hall 362