Get that into your head: Tigre vowel harmonies as templatic

What it is about

The paper argues that vocalic expressions are templatic: each has a head position and a dependent position, and the same element can fill both. It tests this on Tigre, an Ethio-Semitic language, using data from one speaker of the Səmhər dialect. Two harmonies are described: lowering, in which the short unstable low vowel becomes [a] when a stable low vowel, an ejective or a pharyngeal occurs in the word, and an optional regressive rounding harmony. The analysis takes I and U as always heads and gives licensing constraints that derive the six-vowel system; headed expressions must branch, so they are long. Only the short, headless vowel undergoes harmony, which is why headedness correlates with the trigger/undergoer split. The analysis is compared with Lowenstamm and Prunet (1988). The evidence is elicited paradigms and judgements, with phonetic checks; no counts are given.

Ideas

I1. Mark each vowel of Tiberian pointing as headed or headless in Phonology of Biblical Hebrew: full vowels headed, reduced vowels (shewa, hataf) headless. Trigger and undergoer roles would then follow from one feature, and the reduction rules need one statement instead of a list. This is a hypothesis to test, not a finding for Hebrew.
I2. Test the guttural condition: the reduced vowel next to a pharyngeal or guttural is lowered to patah, and the paper's blocking facts (a stable vowel blocks lowering) suggest what to count. In pointed text from tools/hbo (pointed mode, MACULA data), count the reduced vowels before and after gutturals, and report the rate of patah against a control set with no guttural.

For Mova

I1 goes into Phonology of Biblical Hebrew. I2 is a measurement in tools/hbo (pointed mode); only if it holds does a rule go into the same chapter. languages/arc/ is the next place to check the same vowel facts.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.466

@article{faust2017get,
  title = {{Get that into your head: Tigre vowel harmonies as templatic}},
  author = {Faust, Noam},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.466},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.466}
}

References

18 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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How to cite this article: Faust, Noam. 2017. Get that into your head: Tigre vowel harmonies as templatic. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 95. 1–15, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.466 ↗ our card
Published: 25 October 2017 find
Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. ↗

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