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- Title
Neutral paired vowels in Mayak and Kurmuk.
- Authors
Ozburn, Avery
- Abstract
Many analyses of vowel harmony derive neutrality by making use of a lack of harmonic counterpart, treating neutrality as equivalent to lack of contrast. This paper considers a case in which this equivalence is false: in Mayak and Kurmuk, both Western Nilotic languages of the Burun subfamily, [a] is neutral to ATR harmony, despite having a counterpart [ʌ] that is permitted in the contexts in which [a] fails to harmonize. In Mayak, [ʌ] is neutral as a harmony trigger, while in Kurmuk, it is not. Moreover, while mid vowels are not contrastive for ATR in these languages, they do harmonize. While these patterns have been described before in Andersen (1999) and Andersen (2007), their implications have not previously been examined within the theoretical literature. Here, I consider them in detail, arguing that there are factors independent of contrast that make low vowels poor targets of ATR harmony and showing that the analysis of Mayak and Kurmuk is impossible if neutrality depends on contrast, but straightforward if we can impose target conditions within the harmony constraints. I consider the implications of such a pattern to the role of contrast in neutrality, proposing that these concepts are fundamentally divorced, but that the same factors that contribute to loss of contrast may also contribute to neutrality.
- Subjects
VOWELS; NEUTRALITY; DIVORCE
- Publication
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2022, Vol 40, Issue 4, p1269
- ISSN
0167-806X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11049-021-09533-y