14 especially in the consideration of different types of neutralization in noun stems see
§4.1. As a final point of clarification, it is important to note my equation of the terms
“marked” and “dominant,” as mentioned above. Because marked features and segments are often identified by their dominant, active behavior, a common assumption is that the
marked features in a language are the dominant ones. Therefore, in later chapters I use evidence of [ATR] markedness as a diagnostic for determining [ATR] dominance. See
Chapter 7 for more discussion on this point.
1.4.2 Types of African vowel systems
African vowel systems provide a large amount of data displaying a wide range of vowel harmony patterns. Nonetheless, there are also remarkable similarities and many patterns
which are very common and widespread. Casali 2003 describes the three basic types of African vowel systems which display [ATR] harmony. These are listed in 6 below
from Casali 2003:309. 6
African vowel systems with [ATR] harmony a. 5Ht system
b. 4HtM system c. 4HtH system
[+high, +ATR] [+high, -ATR]
[-high, +ATR] [-high, -ATR]
[+low, -ATR] Much of the earliest work on African vowel harmony focused on the first type of system
5Ht, which has 9 or 10 underlying vowels at five vowel heights and has [ATR] contrast in both the mid and high vowels. This type of system exhibits what has often
15 been called “cross-height” vowel harmony since vowels harmonize across different
vowel heights, based on the tongue root feature. The second inventory type, shown in b, has seven vowels underlyingly at four different heights, and only the mid vowels have an
[ATR] contrast. I argue in Chapter 3 that this is Ikoma’s vowel inventory. Throughout the remainder of this thesis I refer to this inventory type as 7VM, signaling that the [ATR]
distinction is in the mid vowels. The third most common system, shown in c, also has seven underlying vowels, but the [ATR] contrast is in the high vowels, not the mid
vowels as in b.
9
Throughout the remainder of this thesis I refer to this inventory type as 7VH, signaling that the [ATR] distinction is in the high vowels.
Casali notes a strong correlation between a language’s vowel inventory and the type of vowel harmony attested in that language. He explains
the dominant [ATR] value in a language is strongly correlated with underlying inventory structure: [+ATR] overwhelmingly functions as the dominant value in
languages with an [ATR] contrast among high vowels, while [−ATR] is regularly dominant in languages in which [ATR] is contrastive only for non-high vowels.
2003 370
This correlation between inventory and harmony type is a relatively recent discovery, so early researchers were certainly not thinking along these lines see discussion in Hyman
1999. This has resulted in a wide variety of descriptive traditions in which single languages have been described as having a different inventory by different linguists, and
different languages with the same inventory have been analyzed as having different types
9
Note that the distinction between these two types of seven-vowel inventories can be surprisingly hard to determine based on phonetics alone. The [ATR] quality of the “height 2” vowels i.e. the second highest
vowels in the system can be difficult to resolve based on impressionistic perceptions alone, and even vowel formant measurements of the pairs [e, ] and [o, ] are often overlapping. Voice quality differences
are sometimes a clue, but aside from phonetic factors, phonological behavior can be a helpful diagnostic for determining what the height 2 vowels really are. See Casali 2003 for more discussion on this point. There
he argues that though this distinction can sometimes be difficult to make, there are clear cases of both types of systems and both corresponding types of harmony i.e. both [+ATR] and [-ATR] harmony, so we must
continue to allow for and distinguish between these two inventory types.
16 of harmony. The following section §1.4.3 briefly reviews the history of the ongoing
debate concerning how to characterize these different types of vowel systems and the features and feature geometries which are involved in vowel harmony alternations.
1.4.3 Vowel height and tongue root features
