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 ...

We investigated the role of key membership and implied harmony in adults' and children's perception of tone sequences. Listeners were evaluated on their ability to detect three types of changes in one note of a well-structured Western tonal melody. In one change (out-of-key) the new note was not in the basis key, in another (out-of-harmony) it was in the key but not in the implied harmony, and ...

Harmony is a process by which some property of a trigger segment spreads onto one or more undergoer segments. In some languages, any segment that bears a harmonizing property will trigger harmony, while in others some segments bearing that property will trigger harmony while others will not. This paper examines such cases in the nasal vowelconsonant harmony systems of several Malayo-Polynesian....

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...