Mayak and the Typology of Labial Harmony

Abstract

Mayak (Western Nilotic) exhibits a pattern of regressive labial harmony that is typologically unique in that non-high vowels undergo cross-height harmony while high vowels do not. This pattern is exceptional under contemporary analyses of labial harmony. This paper demonstrates that harmony in Mayak is not exceptional, but rather necessitates a redefinition of contrast in terms of auditory similarity rather than abstract features. Moreover, it is argued herein that harmony is preferentially triggered by perceptually similar contrasts and also preferentially targets perceptually similar contrasts. A formal analysis using phonetically-enriched representations is able to account for the Mayak pattern. Under this analysis, syntagmatic identity is predicted to predominate the typology of labial harmony. A statistical analysis of harmony from a survey of over sixty languages corroborates this prediction. Thus, the analysis presented herein can account for the seemingly exceptional pattern in Mayak while maintaining key generalizations present in other contemporary analyses of labial harmony.

Vowel dispersion and Kazakh labial harmony

“…She argues that labial harmony involves multiple linking of a single [round] feature, and because lip gestures differ according to vowel height, the phonetic modulation of the lips to accommodate these differences militates against cross-height harmony (1995: §5.6). The importance of this generalisation is corroborated by McCollum (2017), who demonstrates in a statistical analysis of 61 languages with labial harmony that the preference for same-height harmony is by far the most important of Kaun's typological generalisations. The other generalisations in (7) are genetically and areally more restricted, but this preference spans the typology 5…”

“…If we maintain that there are real restrictions on harmony, then cases like Mayak demonstrate that these restrictions cannot be featural in nature. McCollum (2017) shows, using both the auditory representations in Flemming (2002) and phonetic data from related Maa (Guion et al 2004), that the Mayak pattern falls out from a dispersion-based restriction on targets. Conceived in this way, all [+round] vowels may trigger harmony, but a restriction on salient [round] alternations limit the set of targets to /ʌ/.…”

Non-iterativity, Icy Targets, and the Need for Non-linear Representations in Feature Spreading

“…If the behavior of high vowels for rounding harmony in Central Crimean Tatar is viewed in the same way as the behavior of high vowels for ATR harmony in Iny, i.e., they are outputs but not propagators, we only need the constraint *HD [+HI, +RD] to analyze this type of rounding harmony pattern. Typologically, such a constraint is well-supported, given that the activity of high vowel triggers for rounding harmony often implies the activity of mid vowel triggers (Kaun 1995(Kaun , 2004McCollum 2017McCollum , 2018. In (17), SPANBIN demands spreading from a high vowel trigger, but prohibits further propagation from a high vowel output.…”