Thematic issue: “Metaphony and Umlaut: Theoretical Issues”
Projected to appear as an early issue of Phonology 42
Vowel harmony patterns that have traditionally been referred to as metaphony or umlaut have a long history of study within generative phonology. Interpreted broadly, these are patterns that target a strong or privileged position, such as a stressed syllable, and they may be non-iterative. Metaphony/umlaut-type systems pose special challenges for phonological theory, and as such, provide an important empirical domain in which to develop, test, and advance theoretical approaches. Metaphony/umlaut patterns have attracted recent attention because of their implications for phonological frameworks, positional licensing, segmental representations and their atomic elements, and intersections with morphology. The goal of this thematic volume is to shed light on these and other issues of significance for phonological theory through the investigation and analysis of metaphony/umlaut.
Submissions are invited which focus on metaphony/umlaut patterns and phonological theory. We seek to include studies of a range of languages or varieties, not limited to Romance and Germanic, for which the terms metaphony and umlaut are most often applied. The emphasis is on phenomena that are often associated with metaphony/umlaut-type systems rather than patterns that have been labeled with these traditional terms. Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
· The representation of the elements involved in metaphony/umlaut and its relevance for segmental representations, e.g. unary features, binary features or gestures, the specific features or gestures that assimilate, marked representations, floating elements;
· The formal mechanism that drives metaphony/umlaut, e.g. details of the type of constraint or rule involved, whether it is different from the mechanism that drives unbounded vowel harmony;
· The role of morphology in metaphony/umlaut patterns, e.g. morphological conditioning, morpheme specificity, heteromorphemic requirements, the phonology-morphology interface;
· The nature of locality in a trigger-target relation, defined in metrical, linear or other terms, issues involving segments that are transparent to harmony or block it;
· Domains for metaphony/umlaut, defined metrically, word-based or otherwise, the role of clitics;
· How markedness plays a role in metaphony/umlaut systems or what metaphony/umlaut reveals about markedness;
· Micro-variation in metaphony/umlaut systems within or across languages and varieties and its analysis;
· Phonetic research that contributes information on the nature of an individual system, variation, typology, etc. and its theoretical analysis;
· Corpus research that sheds light on the nature of an individual system, variation, typology, etc. and its theoretical analysis;
· The computational properties of metaphony/umlaut and how they bear on theories of phonological computation.
This thematic issue will be edited by Michela Russo (CNRS SFL /Paris & U. Lyon) and Rachel Walker (University of California, Santa Cruz). It is projected to appear as an early issue of Phonology 42.
The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2024.
General information on the submission of manuscripts can be found on the Phonology website (http://journals.cambridge.org/pho). The call for papers can be accessed on the Phonology website here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-file-manager/file/64f744c6bd4434b3f8e0e165. Submissions should be uploaded in PDF format to ScholarOne (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/phonology).
Contributors should feel free to contact the editors directly with questions at any time in the submission process, at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
Computational Linguistics
Linguistic Theories
Phonetics
Phonology