Vowel harmony shift in Mongolian
Author
Summary, in English
It has generally been assumed that Mongolian has vowel harmony of the palatal (front-back) type, but in this article I will present acoustic data from several Mongolian dialects, which show that there has been a shift in the phonetic basis of vowel harmony from palatality in Classical Mongolian to pharyngeality in modern East Mongolian (including Khalkha and Inner Mongolian).
I will also treat Mongolian vowel harmony and the vowel harmony shift in terms of generative phonology. As far as I know, this is the first time a vowel harmony shift has been descripted in detail, and the description gives rise to several problems which cannot be solved using Chomsky and Halle's feature system or the different amendments to it, which have been proposed to deal with pharyngeal harmony. For this reason I have adopted the feature system worked out by Sidney Wood, based on cross-linguistic studies of vowel articulation, within which the vowel harmony shift can be described as a rule simplification.
I will also treat Mongolian vowel harmony and the vowel harmony shift in terms of generative phonology. As far as I know, this is the first time a vowel harmony shift has been descripted in detail, and the description gives rise to several problems which cannot be solved using Chomsky and Halle's feature system or the different amendments to it, which have been proposed to deal with pharyngeal harmony. For this reason I have adopted the feature system worked out by Sidney Wood, based on cross-linguistic studies of vowel articulation, within which the vowel harmony shift can be described as a rule simplification.
Department/s
Publishing year
1985
Language
English
Pages
283-327
Publication/Series
Lingua
Volume
67
Issue
4
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Elsevier
Topic
- General Language Studies and Linguistics
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 0024-3841