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Strident harmony from the perspective of an inductive learner

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Gillian Gallagher
Gillian Gallagher*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003 USA
*
ggillian@nyu.edu

Abstract

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In languages with strident harmony, stridents within a particular domain are required to have the same minor place of articulation. Harmony is often required only of stridents within a root or stem morpheme, and doesn't trigger alternations. Harmony is also often quite local, applying exclusively or more strongly between stridents in the same or adjacent syllables. Finally, harmony may be morpheme specific, triggering alternations in some affixes but not others. All of these specifics of a given harmony pattern give rise to exceptions to harmony at the level of the word, and may require a morphologically parsed learning corpus in order to be acquired. This paper explores the learnability of strident harmony in text corpora from three languages: Nkore-Kiga (Bantu), Papantla Totonac (Totonacan) and Navajo (Athapaskan). The analyses show that word level exceptions largely obscure the harmony pattern as an overall phonotactic in a language. The three languages also serve as a test of the Projection Induction Learner (Gouskova & Gallagher 2020), which is found to be successful when the generalizations in the data are strong but may fail in the face of patterned exceptions.

Keywords

strident harmonyphonotactic learningmaximum entropyconstraint induction

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonological Data and Analysis , Volume 2 , Issue 8 , 2020 , pp. 1 - 29
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
Published by the Linguistic Society of America with permission of the authors under a CC BY 3.0 license.
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Gillian Gallagher.

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Maria Gouskova for comments on this paper, as well as three anonymous reviewers and PDA editor Megan Crowhurst. Will Bennett provided assistance in interpreting the Nkore-Kiga literature and data; Alicia Chatten was instrumental in putting together the corpora of Navajo and in summarizing the typology of strident harmony systems; Ildikó Emese Szabó assisted in analyzing cooccurrence statistics in the corpora. This work was supported by NSF BCS-1724753.

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