Asymmetries in Vowel Harmony

This book deals with the phenomenon of vowel harmony a phonological process whereby all the vowels in a word are required to share a specific phonological property such as front or back articulation. Vowel harmony occurs in the majority of languages of the world though only in very few European languages and has been a central concern in phonological theory for many years. In this volume Harry van der Hulst puts forward a new theory of vowel harmony which accounts for the patterns of and exceptions to this phenomenon in the widest range of languages ever considered. <p/>The book begins with an overview of the general causes of asymmetries in vowel harmony systems. The two following chapters provide a detailed account of a new theory of vowel harmony based on unary elements and licensing which is embedded in a general dependency-based theory of phonological structure. In the remaining chapters this theory is applied to a variety of vowel harmony phenomena from typologically diverse languages including palatal harmony in languages such as Finnish and Hungarian labial harmony in Turkic languages and tongue root systems in Niger-Congo Nilo-Saharan and Tungusic languages. The volume provides a valuable overview of the diversity of vowel harmony in the languages of the world and is essential reading for phonologists of all theoretical persuasions.<br>