Vowel Harmony in Government Phonology:Three for the Price of One

Abstract

Altaic languages provide many interesting phenomena for linguists to study. One of these is vowel harmony, which fascinates phonologists from all frameworks and offers an opportunity to test various analyses according to their theoretical backgrounds. Three different types of vowel harmony have been proposed by Government Phonologists. The purpose of this paper is to identify a common factor between the three analyses, and to ask whether these can be unified.Government Phonology (henceforth GP) is a theoretical framework . Licensing relationships between the smallest units of sound (elements) and between the structural positions these occupy form the essence of GP theory. Harmony phenomena are particularly useful for illustrating the relationships between the harmonising element and other elements within a nuclear expression, as well as for illustrating the relationships between the positions that elements occupy.In this paper three standard GP analyses of harmony are described: firstly, element spreading from the harmonic head nucleus; secondly, element reduction from a non-head nucleus; and lastly, the licensing of nuclear positions to dominate a headed expression. Turkish is usually analysed in GP as an example of the first (Charette & Goksel 1996). The second has been proposed for various languages, including Pasiego Spanish (Harris 1990) and Uighur (Denwood 1993). The third is proposed for Vata, an Ivory Coast language, (Walker 1995) and Khalkha Mongolian (Denwood 1995, 1997). It is suggested here that all three are simply instantiations of a single harmonic licensing process.