Harmony Processes

Abstract

Harmony processes characteristically regulate the distribution of a given feature or feature complex in specific, not necessarily contiguous phonemes of a word. For example, in Finnish words the back-front contrast in rounded and in low vowels — but not in nonlow unrounded vowels — agrees with that of the stem, whereas in Navaho words, the contrast of anterior-nonanterior in coronal affricates and continuants — but not in other phonemes — is determined by the last coronal affricate or continuant in the word. Harmony processes fall into two distinct types depending on whether the harmonic features propagate in one direction only, or whether the propagation occurs in both directions. We shall term the former type, directional harmony, and the latter type, dominant harmony. We propose that the facts of dominant harmony are best described with the devices of autosegmental phonology, whereas those of directional harmony are best characterized by making use of the tree construction developed in recent work in metrical phonology.¹We illustrate these proposals in sections 1 and 2 below; in section 3 we compare the descriptive effectiveness of the two mechanisms in dealing with different bodies of data.

The material present in this study is to be included in a longer work on metrical phonology which has been in preparation for some time, se Vergnaud and Halle (1979) and Halle and Vergnaud (1980). We are grateful to G.N. Clements, L. Hyman, P. Kiparsky, W. Poser, D. Steriade and M.L. Zubizarreta for comments and criticisms. This work was supported in part by National Institutes of Mental Grant #5 PO 1 MH 13990-14.