LINGUIST List 13.1642

Mon Jun 10 2002

Sum: Consonant Harmony

Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>

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  • Dan Everett, Consonant Harmony

    Message 1: Consonant Harmony

     Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 11:35:44 -0300
    From: Dan Everett <dan_everettsil.org>
    Subject: Consonant Harmony


    A couple of days ago I posted a question on Consonant Harmony (CH) in adult phonologies. I asked the question this way:

    "Folks, Does anyone know of clear cases of Consonant Harmony occurring in adult speech? Some researchers have observed CH in L1 acquisition data, but others have claimed that it cannot appear in adult speech. I reported on an apparent case in: 1985 'Syllable Weight, Sloppy Phonemes, and Channels in Pirah� Discourse,' In: Mary Niepokuj et.al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 11, pp 408-416. In child language acquisition cases might look like: [mom] for German /Baum/ or [guk] for /buk/ 'book', etc. In Piraha it looks like ?apapai 'head' ~ ?a?a?ai 'head' (?=glottal); Kohoi 'name' ~ Kokoi, etc." ****************************** ****************************** I received a few responses, all useful, and I thank the respondents for taking the time to help out. Most respondents noted that my question was not all that clear, because CH has many different forms. As they deduced correctly from my examples, however, I was after primary place harmony. Here is what I learned. I hope it is useful to some LL readers as well:

    >From Vern M. Lindblad: "... some Turkic lgs. have an alternation pattern that I would consider to be a form of consonant harmony. Along with the well-known patterns of backness harmony in vowels that are found in most Turkic lgs., some also have velar consonants in suffixes in front harmonic environments alternating with the corresponding uvular consonants in back harmonic environments. The specific example I know best is Uyghur, but I seem to remember that others show similar patterns. My guess would be that any Turkic lg. with both velars and uvulars would probably display this pattern."

    >From Adam Werle: "... it sounds from your inquiry on the Linguist List like you're mainly interested in adult consonant harmony of major place (i.e. labial, coronal, dorsal). But if you're also interested in secondary place C harmony (e.g. lip rounding, palatality, etc.), you may be interested in Gunnar Hansson's (gohuchicago.edu) dissertation, which is a survey of C harmony systems across languages. One of his findings, I think, is that major place C harmony is unattested in adult language."

    The reference to Hansson's thesis was quite useful. Before I could pursue it, Hansson himself wrote, summarizing his research. His research seems to be the most recent and most exhaustive work on the subject and his thesis is soon to be published by CSLI, as I understand it. Here is what Gunnar wrote:

    " From the discussion in your query, it appears that by "consonant harmony" you are referring specifically to *place* harmony--long-distance agreement in (primary) place of articulation. This is what is so prevalent in child language (although other types do occur as well) and at the same time seems to be unattested in adult language.

    I just wanted to emphasize that other types of CH do occur in adult language, involving a wide range of properties: laryngeal features (voicing, glottalization, aspiration, or some combination of these), nasality (e.g., in many Bantu lgs, where nasals and voiced stops interact without any concomitant nasalization of intervening segments), laterality/rhoticity (interaction of laterals and rhotics), stricture (interaction of fricatives and stops, or fricatives and affricates), secondary articulation (pharyngealization, velarization, labialization, etc., again without affecting intervening segments), and so forth. At the end of the scale that's closest to the primary-place harmony of child language, you also find various types of "minor-place" CH. The most obvious and most common type, of course, is coronal harmony (typically sibilant harmony, but many other varieties exist), but there are also several cases of "dorsal harmony", where uvulars and velars are involved in long-distance assimilation (as before, without intervening segments being affected).

    You may want to have a look at my 2001 UC Berkeley dissertation, which discusses at great length the typology of attested CH systems and cites a great amount of data culled from the descriptive literature.

    Returning to (major-)place consonant harmony, it does seem to be unattested--at least as a regular phonological process--in adult language, as far as I know. Nevertheless, I point out in the dissertation that a great number of languages have MSCs that are *usually* stated as laryngeal dissimilation, but which could equally well be expressed as a matter of place assimilation/harmony (parasitic on laryngeal features). For example, many languages allow homorganic glottalic-glottalic combinations (/k'Vk'V/, /t'Vt'V/, etc.) as well as heterorganic glottalic-pulmonic combinations (/k'VtV/, /t'VpV/ etc.), but crucially exclude heterorganic glottalic-glottalic combinations. (A number of these are discussed in Margaret MacEachern's 1997 UCLA dissertation.) The usual way of phrasing this generalization--e.g., in Yip's (1989) discussion of Yucatec--has been that "if two consonants differ in place, they must also differ in laryngeal features" (or vice versa). But it is equally possible to describe it as a requirement that "if two consonants agree in laryngeal features, they must also agree in place", which is then by definition a case of (static) consonant place harmony. From a synchronic-descriptive standpoint, the two are equivalent, but a relevant question to ask is, of course, what really happened historically that led to this synchronic pattern (assimilation or dissimilation?)."

    Others who wrote were Lameen Souag, who said: "...emphatic spread in Arabic dialects (eg Algerian r.aas > r.aas., Egyptian t.alab > t.al.ab) seems like a pretty clear case of consonant harmony to me... I don't know any references to recommend offhand, but any discussion of Arabic phonology or Arabic dialectal phonology should incorporate it."

    Mikael Parkvall mentioned cases of CH in Rajasthani and some North American languages: "...* Some varieties of Rajasthani (and apparently also some other Indo-Aryan lgs) has consonantal harmony (Masica 1991:130). * Some North American American languages too, are said to have it, in particular Athabaskan ones (Mithun 1999:26ff, 361). Mithun, Marianne (1999): The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Masica, Colin (1991): The Indo-Aryan languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press."

    Stephan Schmid reported that "... Laver (1994: 388-9) claims that there be CH in the Niger-Kongo language Estako, establishing three consonant harmony sets, i.e. tense, lax, and neutral."

    John Koontz offered some general comments on separating CH from Vowel Harmony by focussing on consonantal feature spread, rather than features which could be attributed to Vowel Harmony or word-level phenomena incidentally affecting consonants.

    Again, I want to thank those that responded. There is some interesting new work on CH in child-language acquisition in progress by Marilyn Vihman and Phil Carr as well, reported at the recent 10th Annual Manchester Phonology Meeting.

    Dan Everett

    P.S. GO BRAZIL - win that Cup!