For as long as there has been a discipline of generative phonology—and even before that—there has been heated debate over the nature of phonological representations and processes. At one end of the spectrum we find linguists who assume hierarchical structure: morae and/or onsets and rimes grouped into syllables; syllables grouped into feet; feet grouped into words. At the opposite end of the sp...

Before beginning to discuss the abilities of men and women to harmonize, the meaning of “harmony” must first be defined. “In harmony” can be considered as being in an ideal state arrived at through regulation and adjustment. At the same time “state” indicates a certain relatedness. As defined in English, harmony can be thought of as a pleasing new relationship which is created when certain elem...

This paper examines acoustic aspects of vowel harmony (VH), understood as regressive vowel-tovowel assimilation, in two regional varieties of French in six speakers’ productions of 107 disyllabic word pairs. In each word pair, the word-initial vowel (V1) was phonemically either /e/ or /o/, and the word-final stressed vowel (V2) alternated between /e-E/, /ø-œ/, /o-O/ or /i-a/. Results are consis...

I present LIBPHON, a nonparametric regression-based model of phonological acquisition that induces a generalised and productive pattern of vowel harmony—including opaque and transparent neutrality—on the basis of simplified formant data. The model quickly learns to generate harmonically correct morphologically complex forms to which it has not been exposed. 1 Explaining phonological patterns Ho...

In this paper, I examine formal properties of surface correspondence and their empirical predictions for languages with partially overlapping harmony patterns. Surface correspondence was introduced as a basis for enforcing feature agreement and disagreement among segments in an output (Walker 2000a). Originating studies focused on consonant harmony, for which surface correspondence offered insi...

This paper is concerned with the acquisition of the semantics and pragmatics of evidentiality. Evidentiality markers encode the speaker’s source for the information being reported in the utterance. While languages like English express evidentiality in lexical markers (I saw that it was raining vs. I heard that it was raining), other languages grammaticalize evidentiality. In Turkish, for all in...

Evidential markers encode the source of a speaker’s knowledge. While some languages express evidentiality by lexical markers (e.g. I saw that it was raining vs. I heard that it was raining), about a quarter of world’s languages grammaticalize evidentiality through specialized markers. For instance, Turkish obligatorily marks all instances of past reference with one of the following two suffixes...