Journal article
Positional faithfulness, positional neutralisation and Shona vowel harmony
Phonology, Vol.14(1), pp.1-46
05/1997
DOI: 10.1017/S0952675797003308
Abstract
The distribution of the feature [high] in Shona verbs
is a
prototypical example of positional neutralisation accompanied by vowel
harmony. In
languages which exhibit positional neutralisation of vowel contrasts, one
or more vowels (generally, the most marked members of the vowel
inventory) may occur distinctively in only a small subset of the structural
positions available in the language. Outside of these positions, the marked
vowels may surface only if they harmonise with a similar vowel in the
privileged position. For example, the mid vowels e and o
in Shona verbs
are contrastive only in root-initial syllables. These vowels may appear
in
subsequent syllables only when preceded by a mid vowel in root-initial
position. A string of height-harmonic Shona vowels is therefore firmly
anchored in the root-initial syllable, as shown in (1):
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Positional faithfulness, positional neutralisation and Shona vowel harmony
- Creators
- Jill N Beckman - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Phonology, Vol.14(1), pp.1-46
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- DOI
- 10.1017/S0952675797003308
- ISSN
- 0952-6757
- eISSN
- 1469-8188
- Number of pages
- 46
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 05/1997
- Academic Unit
- Linguistics
- Record Identifier
- 9984222751002771
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