Neutral Vowels in Optimality Theory: A Comparison of Yoruba and Wolof

Abstract

Patterns of vowel harmony are frequently interrupted by the presence of neutral segments, segments that are obligatorily realised with only one of the harmonic values. Peripherally, neutral segments appear in two patterns, referred to as relative and absolute alignment. Medially, such neutral segments may be opaque, interrupting the transmission of harmony, or they may be transparent, skipped over by harmony. It is argued that the properties of neutrality result from the interaction of three independently motivated families of constraints: faithfulness, alignment, and grounding. No process-specific constraints distinguishing between the types of alignment or between opacity and transparency are required under the proposed account.

Not crazy after all these years? Perceptual grounding for long-distance vowel harmony

“…In Finnish, vowels which would undergo harmony in native stems do not alternate in loanwords; despite being fully contrastive in the inventory, these vowels are variably transparent. Furthermore, the very similar dialects of Ifẹ and Ọyọ Yoruba illustrate the fact that identical vowel inventories can exhibit either transparency or opacity-high vowels [i] and [u] lack [-atr] counterparts in both dialects, but they are transparent in Ifẹ and opaque in Ọyọ (Pulleyblank, 1996). Regardless of how phonological contrast is determined, Ifẹ and Ọyọ should behave identically; the fact that one dialect exhibits transparency and the other exhibits opacity suggests that defining locality in terms of feature tiers is unsuccessful.…”

Positional Faithfulness

“…Featural alignment was originally suggested in Kirchner (1993) , and further developed in numerous works, including Pulleyblank (1993Pulleyblank ( , 1994, Akinlabi (1994Akinlabi ( , 1995, Archangeli & Pulleyblank (1994b), Beckman (1994b), Itô & Mester (1994), Cole & Kisseberth (1995a,b,c), and Ringen & Vago (1995a,b).…”

“…Following a number of recent OT analyses of harmony (Kirchner 1993;Pulleyblank 1993Pulleyblank , 1994Akinlabi 1994Akinlabi , 1995Archangeli & Pulleyblank 1994b, inter alia), I assume that the constraint in question is the nasal alignment constraint of (62). (64) and demonstrated in (65).…”

Reinterpreting transparency in nasal harmony

“…Following a proposal first made by Kirchner (1993), the multiple linking outcome can be achieved using featural alignment constraints to drive feature spreading (see also Smolensky 1993;Cole & Kisseberth 1995;Akinlabi 1996;Pulleyblank 1996; among others; see McCarthy & Prince 1993 on the general notion of alignment). A rightward [nasal] spreading constraint is given in (11).…”