Markedness, Segment Realisation, and Locality in Spreading

One of the fundamental observations of linguistic theory is that linguistic elements do not interact over arbitrarily great distances. Instead, relations obtain locally. This conviction would seem trivial if all phonological interaction were obviously confined to adjacent segments, or all syntactic relations to adjacent words. In reality, the assumption of locality requires work for those assuming it; in phonology, it has for this reason been one of the important forces driving the elaboration of metrical and autosegmental representations. Consider the case of long-distance feature spreading, or harmony. It is well known that segments within a spreading domain may appear to be non-participants, transparent to the harmony process. A few types of such transparency are listed in (1).