A central claim of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince
1993a) is that phonological variation can be modeled through the variable ranking of
universal constraints. In this thesis, I test this claim by examining variation in the tongue
root vowel harmony system in a number of closely related yet distinct Bantu languages of
Congo and Zaire. The twenty-odd languages are drawn from each of Guthrie 1967's eight
Bantu C. subgroups and are shown to vary along a number of dimensions. One is
morphological, related to whether or not the harmonic element in the lexical root extends
to prefixes and suffixes. This variation is shown to follow from the variable ranking of
constraints that seek to ALIGN the harmonic feature, [retracted tongue root] ([rtr]) with
the edges of the morphological domains STEM and WORD. A second parameter of
variation concerns the relationship between high vowels and [rtr]. A third dimension
involves the interaction of [rtr] with the low vowel [a] under harmony. Here, three
patterns involving (i) low vowel assimilation, (ii) low vowel opacity, or (iii) low vowel
transparency under harmony are shown to follow from the variable ranking of a few
constraints. A significant theme that emereges in the study is recognizing and
characterizing the distinct morphological and phonological domain edges involved in
vowel harmony. An important contribution of this study is in bringing to light a language
family where phonological tongue height, in this case expressed by the feature [low], is
shown to be incompatible with tongue root retraction, as expressed in the feature [rtr].
Although the gestures of tongue body lowering and tongue root retraction are
sympathetic in the articulatory dimension and in their acoustic effect, they are seen to be
phonologically hostile, in fact, because of the redundancy relation between them. This
redundancy-based phonological incompatibility is implemented via licensing-failure:
[low] fails to "license" [rtr] because lowness implies retraction (Ito, Mester and Padgett
1994).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/6658 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Leitch, Myles Francis |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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