Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T09:12:09.223Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Relating application frequency to morphological structure: the case of Tommo So vowel harmony*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2016

Laura McPherson  and
Bruce Hayes
Laura McPherson*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
Bruce Hayes*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
*
E-mail: laura.e.mcpherson@dartmouth.edu, bhayes@humnet.ucla.edu.
E-mail: laura.e.mcpherson@dartmouth.edu, bhayes@humnet.ucla.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We describe three vowel-harmony processes in Tommo So and their interaction with morphological structure. The verbal suffixes of Tommo So occur in a strict linear order, establishing a Kiparskian hierarchy of distance from the root. This distance is respected by all three harmony processes; they ‘peter out’, applying with lower frequency as distance from the root increases. The function relating application rate to distance is well fitted by families of sigmoid curves, declining in frequency from one to zero. We show that, assuming appropriate constraints, such functions are a direct consequence of Harmonic Grammar. The crucially conflicting constraints are Ident (violated just once by harmonised candidates) and a scalar version of Agree (violated one to seven times, based on closeness of the target to the root). We show that our model achieves a close fit to the data, while a variety of alternative models fail to do so.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , May 2016 , pp. 125 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Robert Daland, Abbie Hantgan, Jeffrey Heath, Kie Zuraw, audiences at the Linguistic Society of America, the Manchester Phonology Meeting, Academia Sinica, Dartmouth College and UCLA, and the anonymous reviewers and editors for Phonology for their help with this article; all remaining defects are the authors’ responsibility. We are also indebted to the Tommo So language consultants, who provided all of the data. We would also like to thank Joni Ricks and her colleagues at the Statistical Consulting Group of the UCLA Institute for Digital Research and Education for their guidance in preparing and interpreting the statistical tests reported here.

The materials used for all the tests (including the program code for the Monte Carlo simulation) are available as online supplementary materials at http://www.journals.cambridge.org/issue_Phonology/Vol33No01. This research was supported by a grant from the Fulbright Foundation and by grants BCS-0537435 and BCS-0853364 from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

References

REFERENCES

Albright, Adam (2012). Additive markedness interactions in phonology. Ms, MIT. Available (January 2016) at http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/colloquia/papers/AlbrightAdditiveMarkedness2012.pdf.Google Scholar
Baković, Eric (2000). Harmony, dominance, and control. PhD dissertation, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo (1999). Constraint interaction in language change: quantity in English and Germanic. PhD dissertation, University of Manchester & University of Santiago de Compostela.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul (1998). Functional phonology: formalizing the interactions between articulatory and perceptual drives. PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Hayes, Bruce (2001). Empirical tests of the Gradual Learning Algorithm. LI 32. 45–86.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Pater, Joe (2016). Convergence properties of a Gradual Learning Algorithm for Harmonic Grammar. In McCarthy & Pater (2016). 389–434.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris (1968). The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N. (1985). The geometry of phonological features. Phonology Yearbook 2. 225–252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clements, G. N. & Sezer, Engin (1982). Vowel and consonant disharmony in Turkish. In van der Hulst, Harry & Smith, Norval (eds.) The structure of phonological representations. Part 2. Dordrecht: Foris. 213–255.Google Scholar
Cole, Jennifer & Kisseberth, Charles (1994). An optimal domains theory of harmony. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 24. 101–114.Google Scholar
de Lacy, Paul (2004). Markedness conflation in Optimality Theory. Phonology 21. 145–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Della Pietra, Stephen, Pietra, Vincent Della & Lafferty, John (1997). Inducing features of random fields. IEEE Transactions: Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 19. 380–393.Google Scholar
Fasold, Ralph W. (1972). Tense marking in Black English: a linguistic and social analysis. Arlington: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Flack, Kathryn (2007). Templatic morphology and indexed markedness constraints. LI 38. 749–758.Google Scholar
Flemming, Edward (2001). Scalar and categorical phenomena in a unified model of phonetics and phonology. Phonology 18. 7–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frisch, Stefan A., Broe, Michael B. & Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (1997). Similarity and phonotactics in Arabic. Available as ROA-223 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Frisch, Stefan A., Pierrehumbert, Janet B. & Broe, Michael B. (2004). Similarity avoidance and the OCP. NLLT 22. 179–228.Google Scholar
Fruehwald, Josef T. (2012). Redevelopment of a morphological class. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18:1. 77–86. Available at http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol18/iss1/10.Google Scholar
Goldrick, Matthew (2000). Turbid output representations and the unity of opacity. NELS 30. 231–245.Google Scholar
Goldwater, Sharon & Johnson, Mark (2003). Learning OT constraint rankings using a Maximum Entropy model. In Spenador, Jennifer, Eriksson, Anders & Dahl, Östen (eds.) Proceedings of the Stockholm Workshop on Variation within Optimality Theory. Stockholm: Stockholm University. 111–120.Google Scholar
Gouskova, Maria (2007). The reduplicative template in Tonkawa. Phonology 24. 367–396.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. (1980). Variation in the group and the individual: the case of final stop deletion. In Labov (1980). 1–36.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. (1991). Explanation in variable phonology: an exponential model of morphological constraints. Language Variation and Change 3. 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hantgan, Abbie & Davis, Stuart (2012). Bondu-so vowel harmony: a descriptive analysis with theoretical implications. Studies in African Linguistics 41. 187–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hargus, Sharon (1988). The lexical phonology of Sekani. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & Wilson, Colin (2008). A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning. LI 39. 379–440.Google Scholar
Hochstetler, J. Lee, Durieux, J. A. & Durieux-Boon, E. I. K. (2004). Sociolinguistic survey of the Dogon language area. SIL International. Available (January 2016) at http://www-01.sil.org/silesr/2004/silesr2004-004.pdf.Google Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon (1993). Nimboran position class morphology. NLLT 11. 559–624.Google Scholar
Jesney, Karen (2011). Licensing in multiple contexts: an argument for Harmonic Grammar. CLS 45:1. 287–301.Google Scholar
Jesney, Karen & Tessier, Anne-Michelle (2011). Biases in Harmonic Grammar: the road to restrictive learning. NLLT 29. 251–290.Google Scholar
Jurgec, Peter (2010). Disjunctive lexical stratification. LI 41. 149–161.Google Scholar
Katamba, Francis (2004). Morphology: critical concepts in linguistics. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kaun, Abigail R. (1995). The typology of rounding harmony: an optimality theoretic approach. PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Kimper, Wendell (2011). Competing triggers: transparency and opacity in vowel harmony. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul (1973). Phonological representations. In Fujimura, Osamu (ed.) Three dimensions of linguistic theory. Tokyo: TEC. 3–135.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul (1977). The rhythmic structure of English verse. LI 8. 189–247.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul (1982). Lexical phonology and morphology. In The Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.) Linguistics in the morning calm. Seoul: Hanshin. 3–91.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul (1984). On the lexical phonology of Icelandic. In Elert, Claes-Christian, Johansson, Iréne & Strangert, Eva (eds.) Nordic Prosody III. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. 135–164.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul (1994). An OT perspective on phonological variation. Handout from Rutgers Optimality Workshop 1993 and New Ways of Analyzing Variation 1994, Stanford University. Available (January 2016) at http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/nwave94.pdf.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul (2000). Opacity and cyclicity. The Linguistic Review 17. 351–365.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul (2003). Syllables and moras in Arabic. In Féry, Caroline & van de Vijver, Ruben (eds.) The syllable in Optimality Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 147–182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirchner, Robert (1993). Turkish vowel disharmony in Optimality Theory. Paper presented at the Rutgers Optimality Workshop, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Kroch, Anthony S. (1989). Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1. 199–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William (ed.) (1980). Locating language in time and space. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Legendre, Géraldine, Miyata, Yoshiro & Smolensky, Paul (1990). Harmonic Grammar: a formal multi-level connectionist theory of linguistic well-formedness: theoretical foundations. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. 388–395.Google Scholar
Linzen, Tal, Kasyanenko, Sofya & Gouskova, Maria (2013). Lexical and phonological variation in Russian prepositions. Phonology 30. 453–515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lombardi, Linda (1999). Positional faithfulness and voicing assimilation in Optimality Theory. NLLT 17. 267–302.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (1999). Sympathy and phonological opacity. Phonology 16. 331–399.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (2004). Headed spans and autosegmental spreading. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Available as ROA-685 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (2007). Hidden generalizations: phonological opacity in Optimality Theory. Sheffield & Bristol, Conn.: Equinox.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. & Pater, Joe (eds.) (2016). Harmonic Grammar and Harmonic Serialism. London: Equinox.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. & Prince, Alan (1995). Faithfulness and reduplicative identity. In Beckman, Jill N., Dickey, Laura Walsh & Urbanczyk, Suzanne (eds.) Papers in Optimality Theory. Amherst: GLSA. 249–384.Google Scholar
McClelland, James & Vander Wyk, Brent C. (2006). Graded constraints on English word forms. Ms, Carnegie Mellon University. Available (January 2016) at http://psych.stanford.edu/~jlm/papers/GCEWFs_2_18_06.pdf.Google Scholar
McPherson, Laura (2013). A grammar of Tommo So. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Mooney, Christopher Z. (1997). Monte Carlo simulation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mosteller, Frederick, Rourke, Robert E. K. & Thomas, George B. (1970). Probability with statistical applications. 2nd edn. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Myers, Scott (1991). Structure Preservation and the Strong Domain Hypothesis. LI 22. 379–385.Google Scholar
Nesbitt, C. F. (1984). The linguistic constraints on a variable process: /t,d/ deletion in Sydney speech. BA thesis, University of Sydney.Google Scholar
Neu, Helene (1980). Ranking on constraints on /t,d/ deletion in American English: a statistical analysis. In Labov (1980). 37–54.Google Scholar
Nida, Eugene (1949). Morphology: the descriptive analysis of words. 2nd edn. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe (2000). Non-uniformity in English secondary stress: the role of ranked and lexically specific constraints. Phonology 17. 237–274.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pater, Joe (2008). Gradual learning and convergence. LI 39. 334–345.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe (2009a). Weighted constraints in generative linguistics. Cognitive Science 33. 999–1035.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pater, Joe (2009b). Morpheme-specific phonology: constraint indexation and inconsistency resolution. In Parker, Steve (ed.) Phonological argumentation: essays on evidence and motivation. London: Equinox. 123–154.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe (2016). Universal Grammar with weighted constraints. In McCarthy & Pater (2016). 1–46.Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher, Pater, Joe, Jesney, Karen, Bhatt, Rajesh & Becker, Michael (2010). Harmonic Grammar with linear programming: from linear systems to linguistic typology. Phonology 27. 77–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prince, Alan (1997). Paninian hierarchies. Ms, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan & Smolensky, Paul (1993). Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative grammar. Ms, Rutgers University & University of Colorado, Boulder. Published 2004, Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rhodes, Russell (2012). Vowel harmony as Agreement by Correspondence. Annual Report of the UC Berkeley Phonology Laboratory. 138–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ringen, Catherine O. & Heinämäki, Orvokki (1999). Variation in Finnish vowel harmony: an OT account. NLLT 17. 303–337.Google Scholar
Ringen, Catherine O. & Vago, Robert M. (1998). Hungarian vowel harmony in Optimality Theory. Phonology 15. 393–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Sharon & Walker, Rachel (2004). A typology of consonant agreement as correspondence. Lg 80. 475–531.Google Scholar
Ryan, Kevin M. (2010). Variable affix order: grammar and learning. Lg 86. 758–791.Google Scholar
Santa Ana, Otto (1991). Phonetic simplification processes in the English of the barrio: a cross-generational sociolinguistic study of the Chicanos of Los Angeles. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Smolensky, Paul (1986). Information processing in dynamical systems: foundations of Harmony Theory. In Rumelhart, D. E., McClelland, J. L. & the PDP Research Group (eds.) Parallel Distributed Processing: explorations in the micro-structure of cognition. Vol. 1: Foundations. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 194–281.Google Scholar
Smolensky, Paul & Legendre, Géraldine (eds.) (2006). The harmonic mind: from neural computation to optimality-theoretic grammar. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Steriade, Donca (2008). A pseudo-cyclic effect in Romanian morphophonology. In Bachrach, Asaf & Nevins, Andrew (eds.) Inflectional identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 313–359.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sussman, Harvey M., Hoemeke, Kathryn A. & Ahmed, Farhan S. (1993). A cross-linguistic investigation of locus equations as a phonetic descriptor for place of articulation. JASA 94. 1256–1268.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tagliamonte, Sali & Temple, Rosalind (2005). New perspectives on an ol’ variable: (t,d) deletion in British English. Language Variation and Change 17. 281–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tesar, Bruce & Smolensky, Paul (2000). Learnability in Optimality Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, Rachel (1998). Nasalization, neutral segments and opacity effects. PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Wilson, Colin (2006). Learning phonology with substantive bias: an experimental and computational study of velar palatalization. Cognitive Science 30. 945–982.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilson, Colin & George, Benjamin (2009). Maxent grammar tool. Software package. Available at http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/MaxentGrammarTool.Google Scholar
Zuraw, Kie (2003). Probability in language change. In Bod, Rens, Hay, Jennifer & Jannedy, Stefanie (eds.) Probabilistic linguistics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 139–176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zuraw, Kie (2012). Quantitative patterns of constraint interaction. Paper presented at the 30th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material 1

Download McPherson & Hayes supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 589.7 KB
Supplementary material: File

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material 2

Download McPherson & Hayes supplementary material(File)
File 214.5 KB
Supplementary material: File

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material 3

Download McPherson & Hayes supplementary material(File)
File 52.7 KB
Supplementary material: File

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material 4

Download McPherson & Hayes supplementary material(File)
File 51.5 KB
Supplementary material: File

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material 5

Download McPherson & Hayes supplementary material(File)
File 17 KB
Supplementary material: File

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material 6

Download McPherson & Hayes supplementary material(File)
File 32.5 KB
Supplementary material: File

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material 7

Download McPherson & Hayes supplementary material(File)
File 29.5 KB
Supplementary material: File

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material 8

Download McPherson & Hayes supplementary material(File)
File 2.2 KB
Supplementary material: File

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material 9

Download McPherson & Hayes supplementary material(File)
File 3.3 KB
Supplementary material: File

McPherson & Hayes supplementary material

Audio

Download McPherson & Hayes supplementary material(File)
File 6.6 MB