A Gestural Account of Neutral Segment Asymmetries in Harmony*

Harmony is a process by which a feature spreads throughout a word or some other domain. The segment that initiates harmony is referred to as the trigger, and those that undergo harmony are its targets. Some segments seemingly do not participate in harmony; these are called neutral segments, and they are of two types. Transparent segments are those that do not undergo harmony but do not stop it from spreading; they appear to have been skipped by the harmony process. Blockers are those neutral segments that stop the spread of a harmonizing feature. Transparency in rounding harmony is exemplified in Halh Mongolian (Mongolic; Mongolia, Russia). In Halh, rounding harmony is triggered by a non-high round vowel in an initial syllable (underlined below) and targets following non-high vowels, as in (1a-b). The high front vowel /i/ behaves transparently, as in (1c-d) (Svantesson, Tsendina, Karlsson, & Franzén 2005).