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...

A fundamental problem in spoken language is the duality between the continuous aspects of phonetic performance and the discrete aspects of phonological competence. We study a specific instance of this problem in Hungarian vowel harmony. We present a model where continuous phonetic distinctions uncovered by our experiments are linked to the discreteness of phonological form using the mathematics...

This paper presents an optimality-theoretic comparison of three round vowel patterns in the Altaic family. At the core is an analysis of bisyllabic trigger round harmony, a pattern uncovered in recent investigation of Classical Manchu and Oroqen (Tungusic; Zhang 1996). In these languages round spreading takes place only when the first two syllables of a word are round. This study isolates two s...

Approaches in Visual Analytics have so far been developed for a wide array of research areas, mainly with a focus on industrial or business applications. The field of linguistics, however, has only marginally incorporated visualizations in its research, e.g. using simple tree representations, attribute-value matrices or network analyses. This paper suggests a new interesting field of applicatio...

This paper introduces Uighur morpheme segmentation, which is a basic part of the comprehensive effort of the Uighur language corpus compilation, conducted at Xinjiang University in cooperation with Kyoto University. Uighur is an agglutinative language with word structures formed by productive affixation of derivational and inflectional suffixes to stems. Derivational suffixes change the meaning...