Vowel harmony in Government Phonology

Polgárdi, Krisztina (2024) Vowel harmony in Government Phonology. In: The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 372-386.

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Abstract

Government Phonology (GP) (Kaye et al. 1985, 1990), is a principles-and-parameters approach to phonological representations, employing monovalent elements and relationships of government and licensing. In GP analyses of vowel harmony, spreading of the harmonic element results from a governing relation between nuclei adjacent on the independently motivated level of nuclear projection. This chapter examines three issues in detail. Concerning the typology of vowel harmony, Element Theory predicts the existence of palatal/I, labial/U, and lowering/A harmony in terms of spreading, ATR-harmony as head agreement, and backing, unrounding, or raising harmony as reduction. Restrictions on the domain of harmony are accounted for utilising the distinction between synthetic and analytic morphology, together with blocking in non-derived environments, as well as employing licensing constraints defining possible element combinations. The behaviour of neutral vowels as transparent or opaque is proposed to follow from whether they contain the harmonic element in their representation.

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