In this paper, I provide an analysis of vowel harmony in Izi, an Igbo language spoken in the East - Central State of Nigeria. Using data from Meier, Meier, and Samuel (1975; hereafter MMB), I argue that harmony in complex verbal structures in Izi is inadequately accounted for within a level ordered model of lexical phonology (Kiparsky 1982, Mohanan 1982, etc...), claiming instead that harmony facts are best accommodated within a non-level ordered approach (cf. Halle and Vergnaud 1987, Halle and Kenstowicz 1991; Halle, Harris, and Vergnaud 1991). In sections 1 and 2, I provide a description of the general pattern of the [ATR]-based vowel harmony system in Izi and motivate [+ATR] as the only value of the feature [ATR] present at the level of underlying representation. In section 3, data are presented demonstrating the inadequacy of a level -ordered treatment of vowel harmony in verbal structures. Finally, in section 4, I propose an alternative, non-level ordered analysis that derives the attested harmony facts via cyclic rule application at a single level. Crucially, particular morphemes in verbal structures are claimed to undergo a pass of the cyclic rules prior to concatenation, a phenomenon which I call selective cyclicity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/227268 |
| Date | January 1991 |
| Creators | Gerfen, Chip |
| Contributors | Ann, Jean, Yoshimura, Kyoko, University of Arizona |
| Publisher | Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ) |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article |
| Relation | Arizona Phonology Conference Vol. 4, Coyote Papers |
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