This paper deals with vowel harmony from a cross-linguistic perspective, with the aim of visualizing the distribution of vowels in corpora so that languages with vowel harmony can be distinguished from those lacking it. For this purpose vowel successions within words are statistically analyzed and visualized in a quadratic matrix whose rows and columns are ordered according to their distributio...

This paper applies finite state technologies to verify the typological validity of Turbid Spreading, a theory of vowel harmony in Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). Previous analyses of vowel harmony in OT have been prone to typological inconsistencies, predicting grammars that do not occur in natural language (Wilson, 2003). However, attempts to eliminate typological patho...

A system of phonological rules and representations has at least two aims: one is to describe the way in which words (and larger stretches of utterances) are realized in speech, and to state which logically possible streams of speech sounds are legitimate in the language under description – this is part of observational adequacy. The other aim is to capture the pattern of sounds characteristic o...

Jingulu, a language of North-Central Australia, exhibits a pattern of regressive vowel harmony which is not only difficult to characterise accurately in descriptive terms, but also poses challenges for current theories of vowel harmony. The purpose of this article is thus threefold: to describe a fascinating phonological phenomenon, to formulate accurate generalisations which capture the phenom...

1. Introduction In linguistic theory, there is a tension between two core aims of the field: theoretical parsimony and empirical coverage of the remarkable diversity and specificity seen in linguistic data. Vowel harmony 1 and more specifically the two phenomena of transparency and opacity in vowel harmony which concern us in this paper provide prime examples of phonological research concerned ...

In Bijagó (Wilson 2000), an asymmetrical vowel system contributes to irregular patterns of vowel harmony that seem to challenge the classificatory powers of some lexical indexation models of exceptionality (e.g. Finley 2009, 2010). In this paper, I develop a set of theoretically-independent exceptionality criteria, which when applied to an analysis of Bijagó reveal that a set of exceptional und...