Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T09:58:07.622Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Long-distance major place harmony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2020

Nick Danis*
Affiliation:
Washington University in St Louis
*

Abstract

In previous surveys of long-distance consonant harmony, the major place features [labial], [dorsal] and [coronal] are conspicuously absent from the set of possible harmonising features. Ngbaka Minagende displays major place harmony between labial-dorsal segments and simple labials and velars, thus filling this empirical gap. The presence of complex segments with multiple place is crucial to seeing this harmony pattern clearly. These patterns are best handled in the Agreement by Correspondence framework with an active CC-Ident[place] constraint. Other analyses either cannot capture the pattern at all or require fundamental changes elsewhere in phonological theory. The data are supported by a new digitisation and statistical analysis of a Ngbaka Minagende dictionary.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank Akinbiyi Akinlabi, Will Bennett, Paul de Lacy, Natalie DelBusso, Brett Hyde, Adam Jardine, Jaye Padgett, Alan Prince and Bruce Tesar for their help and guidance at various points in this project. I would also like to thank audiences at Rutgers University and the 2016 Annual Meeting on Phonology at USC, where earlier versions of this work were presented. The manuscript improved greatly through comments from the associate editor and three anonymous reviewers, and I thank them as well. Others who have made contributions, both large and small, are acknowledged throughout, and I apologise for any names omitted. All mistakes are my own.

References

REFERENCES

Alderete, John (1997). Dissimilation as local conjunction. NELS 27. 1731.Google Scholar
Archangeli, Diana (2011). Feature specification and underspecification. In van Oostendorp et al. (2011). 148170.Google Scholar
Beckman, Jill N. (1998). Positional faithfulness. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Beckman, Jill N., Dickey, Laura Walsh & Urbanczyk, Suzanne (eds.) (1995). Papers in Optimality Theory. Amherst: GLSA.Google Scholar
Bennett, Wm. G. (2015). The phonology of consonants: harmony, dissimilation, and correspondence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cahill, Michael (1999). Aspects of the phonology of labial-velar stops. Studies in African Linguistics 28. 155184.Google Scholar
Cahill, Michael (2000). Positional contrast and labial-velars. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics 53. 7192.Google Scholar
Cahill, Michael (2006). The place of labial-velars. Handout of paper presented at the 37th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, University of Oregon.Google Scholar
Casali, Roderic F. (1995). Labial opacity and roundness harmony in Nawuri. NLLT 13. 649663.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris (1968). The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N. (2000). Phonology. In Heine, Bernd & Nurse, Derek (eds.) African languages: an introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 123160.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N. & Hume, Elizabeth V. (1995). The internal organization of speech sounds. In Goldsmith (1995). 245306.Google Scholar
Coetzee, Andries W. & Pater, Joe (2008). Weighted constraints and gradient restrictions on place co-occurrence in Muna and Arabic. NLLT 26. 289337.Google Scholar
Connell, Bruce (1994). The structure of labial-velar stops. JPh 22. 441476.Google Scholar
Connell, Bruce (1998–99). Feature Geometry and the formation of labial-velars: a reply to Mutaka and Ebobissé. Journal of West African Languages 27:1. 1732.Google Scholar
Danis, Nick (2017). Complex place and place identity. PhD thesis, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
de Lacy, Paul (2006). Markedness: reduction and preservation in phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Lacy, Paul (2011). Markedness and faithfulness constraints. In van Oostendorp et al. (2011). 14911512.Google Scholar
Frisch, Stefan A. (2011). Frequency effects. In van Oostendorp et al. (2011). 21372163.Google Scholar
Frisch, Stefan A., Pierrehumbert, Janet B. & Broe, Michael B. (2004). Similarity avoidance and the OCP. NLLT 22. 179228.Google Scholar
Gafos, Adamantios I. (1999). The articulatory basis of locality in phonology. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Gillian & Coon, Jessica (2009). Distinguishing total and partial identity: evidence from Chol. NLLT 27. 545582.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, John A. (ed.) (1995). The handbook of phonological theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Louis, Pouplier, Marianne, Chen, Larissa, Saltzmann, Elliot & Byrd, Dani (2007). Dynamic action units slip in speech production errors. Cognition 103. 386412.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gouskova, Maria (2007). Dep: beyond epenthesis. LI 38. 759770.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris (1995). Feature geometry and feature spreading. LI 26. 146.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris, Vaux, Bert & Wolfe, Andrew (2000). On feature spreading and the representation of place of articulation. LI 31. 387444.Google Scholar
Hammarström, Harold, Forkel, Robert, Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian (2016). Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Available (August 2019) at http://glottolog.org.Google Scholar
Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur (2010). Consonant harmony: long-distance interaction in phonology. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (1986a). Assimilation as spreading in Toba Batak. LI 17. 467499.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (1986b). Inalterability in CV phonology. Lg 62. 321351.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & Wilson, Colin (2008). A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning. LI 39. 379440.Google Scholar
Heinz, Jeffrey (2010). Learning long-distance phonotactics. LI 41. 623661.Google Scholar
Heinz, Jeffrey, Rawal, Chetan & Tanner, Herbert G. (2011). Tier-based strictly local constraints in phonology. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Vol. 2. Association for Computational Linguistics. 5864.Google Scholar
Hyde, Brett (2012). Alignment constraints. NLLT 30. 789836.Google Scholar
Iacoponi, Luca (2016). Fixed ranking over stringency in faithfulness constraints. Poster presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting on Phonology, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
Jardine, Adam (2016). Locality and non-linear representations in tonal phonology. PhD thesis, University of Delaware.Google Scholar
Jardine, Adam & Heinz, Jeffrey (2015). Markedness constraints are negative: an autosegmental constraint definition language. CLS 51. 301315.Google Scholar
Katamba, Francis & Hyman, Larry (1991). Nasality and morpheme structure constraints in Luganda. In Katamba, Francis (ed.) Lacustrine Bantu phonology. Cologne: University of Cologne. 175211.Google Scholar
Kenstowicz, Michael & Kisseberth, Charles (1977). Topics in phonological theory. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter (1968). A phonetic study of West African languages: an auditory-instrumental study. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter & Maddieson, Ian (1996). The sounds of the world's languages. Oxford & Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lombardi, Linda (1999). Positional faithfulness and voicing assimilation in Optimality Theory. NLLT 17. 267302.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (1994). The phonetics and phonology of Semitic pharyngeals. In Keating, Patricia A. (ed.) Phonological structure and phonetic form: papers in laboratory phonology III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 191233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (2003). OT constraints are categorical. Phonology 20. 75138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, John J. & Prince, Alan (1995). Faithfulness and reduplicative identity. In Beckman et al. (1995). 249384.Google Scholar
MacEachern, Margaret R. (1999). Laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
McMullin, Kevin & Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur (2015). Long-distance phonotactics as Tier-Based Strictly 2-Local languages. In Albright, Adam & Fullwood, Michelle A. (eds.) Proceedings of the 2014 Annual Meeting on Phonology. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/amp.v2i0.3750.Google Scholar
Maes, V. (1959). Dictionnaire ngbaka-français-néerlandais, précédé d'un aperçu grammatical. Tervuren: Commissie voor Afrikaanse Taalkunde/Commission de Linguistique Africaine.Google Scholar
Mester, R. Armin (1986). Studies in tier structure. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Ní Chiosáin, Máire & Padgett, Jaye (1997). Markedness, segment realization, and locality in spreading. Report LRC-97-01, Linguistics Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Odden, David (1994). Adjacency parameters in phonology. Lg 70. 289330.Google Scholar
Oostendorp, Marc van, Ewen, Colin J., Hume, Elizabeth & Rice, Keren (eds.) (2011). The Blackwell companion to phonology. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Padgett, Jaye (1995). Feature classes. In Beckman et al. (1995). 385420.Google Scholar
Padgett, Jaye (2002). Feature classes in phonology. Lg 78. 81110.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe (1999). Austronesian nasal substitution and other NC̥ effects. In Kager, René, van der Hulst, Harry & Zonneveld, Wim (eds.) The prosody–morphology interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 310343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (1993). Dissimilarity in the Arabic verbal roots. NELS 23. 367381.Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher & Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2002). Model theory and the content of OT constraints. Phonology 19. 361393.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pouplier, Marianne, Chen, Larissa, Goldstein, Louis & Byrd, Dani (1999). Kinematic evidence for the existence of gradient speech errors. JASA 106. 2242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pozdniakov, Konstantin & Segerer, Guillaume (2007). Similar place avoidance: a statistical universal. Linguistic Typology 11. 307348CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prince, Alan (2002). Arguing optimality. In Carpenter, Angela C., Coetzee, Andries W. & Lacy, Paul de (eds.) Papers in Optimality Theory II. Amherst: GLSA. 269304.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan & Smolensky, Paul (1993). Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative grammar. Ms, Rutgers University & University of Colorado, Boulder. Published 2004, Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan, Tesar, Bruce & Merchant, Nazarré (2016). OTWorkplace. Software package. https://sites.google.com/site/otworkplace.Google Scholar
Pulleyblank, Douglas (2002). Harmony drivers: no disagreement allowed. BLS 28. 249267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rehg, Kenneth L. & Sohl, Damian G. (1981). Ponapean reference grammar. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
Rice, Keren (1993). A reexamination of the feature [sonorant]: the status of ‘sonorant obstruents’. Lg 69. 308344.Google Scholar
Rose, Sharon & Walker, Rachel (2004). A typology of consonant agreement as correspondence. Lg 80. 475531.Google Scholar
Sagey, Elizabeth (1986). The representation of features and relations in nonlinear phonology. PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Sharpe, Donald (2015). Your chi-square test is statistically significant: now what? Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation 20.8. https://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=20&n=8.Google Scholar
Shaw, Patricia A. (1991). Consonant harmony systems: the special status of coronal harmony. In Paradis, Carole & Prunet, Jean-François (eds.) The special status of coronals: internal and external evidence. New York: Academic Press. 125157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shih, Stephanie S. & Inkelas, Sharon (2019). Autosegmental aims in surface-optimizing phonology. LI 50. 137196Google Scholar
Simons, Gary F. & Fennig, Charles D. (eds.) (2018). Ethnologue: languages of the world. 21st edn. Dallas: SIL International. Available at http://www.ethnologue.com.Google Scholar
Stanton, Juliet (2017). Segmental blocking in dissimilation: an argument for co-occurrence constraints. In Jesney, Karen, O'Hara, Charlie, Smith, Caitlin & Walker, Rachel (eds.) Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Meeting on Phonology. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/amp.v4i0.3972.Google Scholar
Steriade, Donca (1995). Underspecification and markedness. In Goldsmith (1995). 114174.Google Scholar
Suzuki, Keiichiro (1998). A typological investigation of dissimilation. PhD dissertation, University of Arizona.Google Scholar
Thomas, Jacqueline M. C. (1963). Le parler Ngbaka de Bokanga: phonologie, morphologie, syntaxe. Paris: Paillart.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel (2001). Consonantal correspondence. In Kirchner, Robert, Pater, Joe & Wikeley, Wolf (eds.) Papers in theoretical linguistics 6: workshop on the lexicon in phonetics and phonology. Edmonton: University of Alberta. 7384.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel (2014). Nonlocal trigger-target relations. LI 45. 501523.Google Scholar
Weijer, Jeroen van de (1994). Stem consonant cooccurrence restrictions in Ngbaka. In Bok-Bennema, Reineke & Cremers, Crit (eds.) Linguistics in the Netherlands 1994. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 259266.Google Scholar
Weijer, Jeroen van de (2011). Secondary and double articulation. In van Oostendorp et al. (2011). 694710.Google Scholar
Yip, Moira (1989). Feature geometry and cooccurrence restrictions. Phonology 6. 349374.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Danis supplementary material

Danis supplementary material
Download Danis supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 119 KB