Modelling the acquisition and evolution of vowel harmony

Mailhot, F.

doi:10.22215/etd/2010-09741

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 124 publications

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“…Finally, agent-based computational modelling has been used to explore various potential trajectories of vowel harmony evolution and decay (e.g. Harrison, Dras & Kapicioglu 2006;Mailhot 2010). From this work, the primary suspected causes of harmony decay include changes in vowel inventories (mergers/splits), the loss of harmonising morphology, and language contact -i.e.…”

Section: Vowel Harmony and Harmony Decaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Vowel harmony decay in Old Norwegian

Sandstedt¹

2020

PiHPh

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Vowel harmony involves the systematic correspondence between vowels in some domain for some phonological feature. Though harmony represents one of the most natural and diachronically robust phonological phenomena that occurs in human language, how and why harmony systems emerge and decay over time remains unclear. Specifically, what motivates harmony decay and the pathways by which harmony languages lose harmony remains poorly understood since no consistent historical record in any single language has yet been identified which displays the full progression of this rare sound change (McCollum 2015, 2020; Kavitskaya 2013, Bobaljik 2018). In this paper, I explore the progression and causation of vowel harmony decay in Old Norwegian (c 1100–1350). Using a grapho‐phonologically tagged database of a sample of 13th‐ to 14th‐century manuscripts, I present novel corpus methods for tracking and visualising changes to vowel co‐occurrence patterns in historical records, demonstrating that the Old Norwegian corpus provides a consistent and coherent record of harmony decay. The corpus distinguishes categorical pre‐decay harmony, probabilistic intermediate stages, and post‐decay non‐harmony. Across the Old Norwegian manuscripts, we observe a variety of pathways of harmony decay, including increasing harmony variability via the collapse of harmony classes introduced by vowel mergers, the lexicalisation of historically harmonising morphemes, and trisyllabic vowel reductions which limit harmony iterativity. This paper provides the first detailed corpus study of the full spectrum and causation of this rare sound change in progress and provides valuable empirical diagnostics for identifying and analysing harmony change in contemporary languages.

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Section: Vowel Harmony and Harmony Decaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Vowel harmony decay in Old Norwegian

Sandstedt¹

2020

PiHPh

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The emergence of vowel harmony in Armenian dialects

Hopkins,

Vaux

2024

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We find vowel harmony systems in many non-standard varieties of modern Armenian. It has been speculated that these may have acquired vowel harmony due to contact with Turkic varieties (Scala 2018). On the basis of an exploration of the synchrony and typology of Armenian vowel harmony, consideration of historical changes that could have caused harmony to develop, and evaluation of new data bearing on the origins of backness and rounding harmony in Oghuz, we propose that the vowel harmony systems of the modern Armenian dialects show evidence of having been influenced by Turkish, but the numerous differences between Armenian and Turkish vowel harmony point against a straightforward copying of the Turkish phonological system. We theorize that vowel harmony in Armenian arose due to a combination of language-internal and ‑external factors: vowel shifts in some Armenian dialects, alongside universal analytic and channel biases, provided the necessary preconditions for the development of vowel harmony by the 11th century AD, prior to the arrival of Turkic speakers in the Armenian homeland. Extensive contact with Turkic vowel systems may then have encouraged the phonologization of this assimilation process, but in strikingly different ways than are found in Turkic languages.

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Modelling the acquisition and evolution of vowel harmony

Cited by 2 publications

References 124 publications

Vowel harmony decay in Old Norwegian

Vowel harmony decay in Old Norwegian

The emergence of vowel harmony in Armenian dialects

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