A Survey of Vowel Harmony with Special Focus on Neutral Segments, Glides, and Diphthongs

Neutral vowels in sound-symbolic vowel harmony in Korean*

The set of neutral vowels in the vowel-harmony pattern found in Modern Korean sound-symbolic words is traditionally considered to consist of two members: [i] and [8]. Some authors have tentatively put forward the hypothesis that [u] and [y] are also neutral. A corpus study on the phonotactics of Korean sound-symbolic vowel harmony provides quantitative support both for the traditional understan...

Acoustic structure and perceptual relevance of 'steady states' and 'glides' within formant trajectories of diphthongs, complex vowels, and vowel clusters

Nasal Spreading as Defective Gestural Deactivation

Nasal spreading (also called nasal vowel-consonant harmony) is a process by which a nasal segment in a word triggers nasalization of its surrounding segments. This paper proposes a reanalysis of this phenomenon using gestures as the units of phonological representation in order to more accurately capture its crosslinguistic typological patterns. Nasal spreading proceeds unboundedly, potentially...

A Gestural Account of Neutral Segment Asymmetries in Harmony*

Harmony is a process by which a feature spreads throughout a word or some other domain. The segment that initiates harmony is referred to as the trigger, and those that undergo harmony are its targets. Some segments seemingly do not participate in harmony; these are called neutral segments, and they are of two types. Transparent segments are those that do not undergo harmony but do not stop it ...

Local and non-local consonant–vowel interaction in Interior Salish*

Local consonant–vowel (C–V) interaction is attested in many languages, both as a phonetic and as a phonological process. There can be a clear developmental relationship between the two, with phonologisation of phonetic interaction occurring quite commonly (Hyman 1976, Ohala 1981). Thus, a common (historical) context for nasal vowels is an adjacent nasal consonant. When consonants trigger non-lo...