ATR Vowel Harmony: new patterns and diagnostics

ATR Harmony: new typological patterns and diagnostics

Phonological studies of ATR harmony have led to advances in autosegmental phonology, markedness theory, and locality. Nevertheless, many of our theoretical assumptions may have been based on misanalyzed data or non-rigorous typological assumptions. For example, detailed acoustic and/or articulatory studies have shown that transparent vowels are not always transparent (Gick et al 2006, Richart &...

Patterns of vowel laxing and vowel harmony in Peninsular Spanish

Vowel Harmony and Subsequentiality

Attested and ‘pathological’ vowel harmony patterns are studied in the context of subclasses of regular functions. The analysis suggests that the computational complexity of phonology can be reduced from regular to weakly deterministic.

Computational Characterizations of Vowel Harmony Patterns and Pathologies

This paper provides a computational analysis of 39 attested vowel harmony patterns in a recent typological analysis (Nevins, 2010), in addition to two unattested harmony patterns which have attracted considerable discussion: ‘majority rules’ (Lombardi, 1999; Baković, 2000) and ‘sour grapes’ (Padgett, 1995). It is shown that these attested patterns, unlike the two unattested ones, are subsequent...

Learning Vowel Harmony

It is possible to construct an unsupervised learning system for vowel harmony, which makes accessible general-isations. Furthermore, such a learning system can be constructed with little built-in knowledge, and, consequently, be applicable to data from a wide range of domains. This paper presents a learning system which fulllls these criteria, and examines the results of applying an implementat...