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Vowel height harmony and blocking in Buchan Scots

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2005

Mary Paster
Mary Paster
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

The Buchan Scots dialect of north-east Scotland exhibits a unique phonological phenomenon: vowel harmony is blocked by intervening consonants that have no secondary articulation or other obvious characteristic that should make them opaque to harmony. In this paper, I describe the harmony and blocking pattern based on new data from speakers of the modern dialect. After establishing this as a phonological rather than phonetic effect, I propose a synchronic analysis of the pattern and a phonetic explanation for the origin of this unusual sound pattern.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , December 2004 , pp. 359 - 407
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The data in this paper are from fieldwork conducted by the author in Scotland in June 2002. This research was funded by a UC Berkeley Humanities Research Grant and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Many thanks to the three linguistic consultants for sharing their language, and to Juliette Blevins, Peter Cowe, Colleen Fitzgerald, Andrew Garrett, Richard Hogg, Sharon Inkelas, Charles Jones, Mark Jones, Julie Larson, Derrick McClure, Ian Maddieson, Jonathan Marshall, Lynn Nichols, John Ohala, Stanley Robertson, Christine Robinson, James Scobbie, Jennifer Smith, Norval Smith, Alice Turk, Bert Vaux and Alan Yu for their contributions to my research and writing. Thanks also to an anonymous associate editor and three anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments and contributions, which greatly improved the paper.