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Re: NATLANG: Vowel harmony rules?

From:Racsko Tamas <tracsko@...>
Date:Saturday, June 19, 2004, 13:33
On 18 Jun 2004 David Peterson <ThatBlueCat@A...> wrote:

> What I mean is for "bil", for example, you get "bilir", but not *bilmik.
That is why I introduced a new type of uderspecified vowel. For details, see below.
> There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why this should be. For > that reason, I think it would be simpler to have two stipulations (well, > three): > > (1) If a verb stem ends in a vowel, it will take /-r/ in the Aorist. > (2) If a verb stem ends in a consonant: > (a) It will take /-Ar/ if it's of Class A, and is not specified further > (b) Else, it will take /-Ir/
What is the reason that you suppose a common underlying morpheme <-Ar> for case 2/a? You could write instead: (2) If a verb stem ends in a consonant: (a) if it's of Class A: (i) it will take <-ar> if the stem is back and (ii) it will take <-er> if the stem is front. I think the only reason for defining "underspecified" vowels as "A" or "I" that we are about to reduce these long definitions. We "save" 2 subrules with "A" and 4 subrules with "I". In line with this the rules are transferred to the phototactics and lexical attributes of the morpheme (note in Hungarian vowel harmony is driven both the phonotactics and the lexicon). But why should we stop here? Why cound not we combine underspecified vowels "A" and "I" into a new group "5"? You say that it is the only suffix of this type in Osmali. It is true [or not, after writing this paragraph I recalled the negative infix], but your above analysis is unique, too. How many verbal markers are in Osmanli which have three different morphs for the same function? I think that <-r>, <-Ar> and <-Ir> are not different morphs but they are the surface representation of the single morpheme <-5r> combined by various types of stems. The underspecified vowel "5" has the following values: (1) Zero vowel after another vowel. (2) After a consonant (a)if the previous stem (suffix) is lowering, treat "5" as it were "A" (b)if it the stem (suffix) is non-lowering, treat "5" as it were "I". The suffix of the infinitive is different, because it has the underlying form <-mAk> not *<-m6k>. Thus we have "bilmek" because "A" is not affected by "lowering harmony".
> Now the form of the non-lowering verb stems becomes an accident (which > doesn't seem so bad, since there are exceptions), and not the form of > the Aorist (which would be unfortunate, IMO).
I do not see any unfortune here. I see this question in a complex Ural-Altaic framework, and from this perspective, this phenomenon is more frequent. However, it bothers me that aorist suffix is seems to be the only Osmanli verbal suffix that has such an accident. In all the other cases I know verbal suffixes have just one underlying form and the actual allophones are determined by the phonological and lexical features of the _stem_ (and not of the suffix). Meanwhile I was thinking it over and I found a possible test of my theory: the negative infix shows a similar dimorphism <-mA> ~ <-mI>. If we could create a common underlying form <-m5> for it (with the assumption that the preceeding stems and suffixes[!] are lexically lowering or non-lowering), it would validate my opinion. I have to study the question of the negative infix in detail (but it takes some time), and possible you also could survey it with a reasonable benevolence against my theory.
> I'm very interested in the Hungarian phenomenon, though. That might > explain a lot.
In Hungarian this is connected with nominal stems. A number of suffixes have a triple undetermined vowel "3" = [+back] /o/ ~ [-back -labial] /e/ ~ [-back +labial] /2/. Some of these have two additional allophones before certain stems (or suffixes) as it were of type "A" = /O/ and /E/. Thus we have suffixes showing vowel harmony type "3" only, and others showing harmony type "A" and a third group that belong to type "5" (="3"+"A"). Hungarian plural marker <-k> is a complete parallelism to Turkish aorist marker, that is it has a asyllabic variant, a variant <-3k> and a variant <-Ak>, the distinction between <-3k> and <-Ak> is determined by the stem, e.g. /Sva:b/ 'Swabian' is a regular non- lowering stem, therefore its plural is /Sva:b|ok/. The word /la:b/ 'foot' is lowering, its plural is /la:b|Ok/. The same is the situation in case of the accusative marker <-5t>: /Sva:b|ot/ 'Swabian+ACC', /la:b|Ot/ 'foot+ACC'. But the plural marker is lowering itself, therefore we have /Svab|ok|Ot/ as the accusative of /Sva:b|ok/ and not */Sva:b|ok|ot/. Another interessant feature of lowering harmony is that it is somehow connected with the parts of speech: if a word changes it parts of speech even without derivational affixes, it can change its valence of lowering harmony, though. E.g. we have an adjective /v2r2S/ 'red' and it is regular non-lowering, its plural (when used predicatively) is /v2r2S|2k/. When this word is used as a noun meaning 'man/woman with red hair, communist, flower with red petals, etc', the stem became lowering, its plural will be /v2r2S|Ek/ (this change is not systemic: it is connected to the actual stem).