The Berkeley Phonetics & Phonology Forum (Phorum) is a weekly talk and discussion series featuring presentations on all aspects of phonology and phonetics.
PREVIOUS MEETINGS:
The native phonology of Finnish exhibits a regular and well-described system of vowel harmony along the front/back dimension --- with the exception of neutral [i] and [e], front and back vowels may not co-occur within roots, and suffixes alternate to take on the backness value of the preceding root. In loanwords, however, front and back vowels are permitted to co-occur. Suffixes attached to these disharmonic roots display variable behavior --- following a [back]-[front] sequence, harmony can either be transparent (skipping the intervening front vowel) or opaque (blocked from reaching the suffix).
In this talk, I argue that the choice between transparency and opacity is best characterized as a competition between potential harmony triggers. I present the results of a nonce-word study on Finnish disharmonic loans, showing that non-high vowels are (a) less likely than their high counterparts to be transparent, and (b) more likely than their high counterparts to induce transparent harmony. This asymmetry is consistent with the cross-linguistic generalization that segments which are perceptually impoverished with respect to a feature contrast tend to be preferential triggers for harmony along that dimension. I analyze these results within the framework of (Serial) Harmonic Grammar, proposing a harmony constraint which (a) assigns rewards for spreading (rather than violations for disharmony) and (b) scales those rewards up or down as a function of the preferential status of the harmony trigger as well as the distance between trigger and target.