8 Harmony Systems SHARON ROSE AND RACHEL WALKER

This chapter addresses harmony systems, a term which encompasses consonant harmony, vowel harmony, and vowel-consonant harmony. Harmony refers to phonological assimilation for harmonic feature(s) that may operate over a string of multiple segments. This can be construed in one of two ways. Two segments may interact “at a distance” across at least one (apparently) unaffected segment, as shown for consonant harmony in (1a). Or, a continuous string of segments may be involved in the assimilation, as shown for vowel-consonant harmony in (1b). The subscripts refer to features or feature sets.