A Phonological Study Of Harmony Phenomena In Uyghur

This dissertation presents a thorough phonological description of the harmony phenomena in Uyghur and a solid theoretical account for all of the Uyghur harmony facts.Vowel harmony has always been a challenging area of research for developing theories of segmental structure. Issues like "locality","transparency", and "directionality" have caused long-standing controversy. Like other Turkic languages, Uyghur displays typical backness harmony system:vowels within a phonological word are either all front or all back. However, there also exist many disharmonic words. One kind of disharmony is caused by neutral vowels:which cooccur with back vowels though phonetically front. Neutral vowels in Uyghur harmony process are transparent:i.e., they are totally invisible to the harmony process. Uyghur harmony, especially the issue of neutral vowels, has received much attention in the literature but not in full detail. This dissertation makes a systematic analysis to explain why Uyghur neutral vowels are not participants in the harmony, and this develops into an explanation for the operational mechanism of Uyghur harmony process, which forms the first major contribution of this dissertation.Based on the theory of contrastive hierarchy (Dresher2002,2003a,2009), which proposes that contrastive feature specifications are decided by a feature hierarchy and only contrastive features are active in the phonology of a given language, I propose that vowels in Uyghur harmony are contrastively specified with three features:[back],[round] and [low] and the feature hierarchy I arrive at is [low]>[round]>[back], which devides all the Uyghur vowels into different subsets. Such devision of vowels is right in consistency with the different phonological behaviour of the vowels from each subset in the harmony process. For example, the neutral vowels fall into the subset which is unspecified with [back] in the Uyghur contrastive hierarchy, resulting in their inertness in the harmony process.Accordingly, I claim that it is the Uyghur contrastive hierarchy that determines the underlying specification of [back] for all the harmonic vowels in Uyghur. Thus all the harmonic vowels in the stem underlyingly specified with [back] are associated with the autosegment [back] in the lexicon. Since neutral vowels are not contrastively specified with [back], they will neither trigger nor block the harmony process. The present analysis strongly suggests that the alternating suffixal vowels are underlyingly underspecified for the feature [back], which motivates a spreading of [back] from the harmonic vowel in the stem. Thus, the operational mechanism of the stem-controlled Uyghur vowel harmony can be understood as a process of feature-spreading.Another intricate aspect of Uyghur harmony process is that the harmony rule interacts with a vowel reduction rule which results in a neutral vowel. Previous studies have shown that the parallel model of classic OT fails to account for the derived neutral vowel in Uyghur since the reduction rule interacts with the harmony rule in a serial order. No previous analysis provides a principled account of the behaviour of this derived neutral vowel satisfactorily. I present a theoretical account for Uyghur facts based on the framework of serial version of OT-Harmonic Serialism McCarthy2000,2002,2010a). This forms the second major contribution of this dissertation.Harmonic Serialism involves stepwise evaluation of candidates instead of parallel evaluation. GEN in Harmonic Serialism produces a set of single-change candidates, EVAL chooses the most optimal one relative to the constraint hierarchy of the language, and this intermediate output is passed back to GEN for another iteration. This loop continues until an output optimum is identical to its input and derivational convergence occurs.Based on well-formedness conditions on underlying representations, I formulate a set of constraints ranked like this:NoCROSS, REDUCE,*Link-i, e>> Link[back] >> EDGE (F, R)>> Dep(link), Max(link).Under this constraint ranking and in the frame work of Harmonic Serialism, all the Uyghur harmony facts come to a satisfactory solution, including the intractable derived neutral vowel problem and disharmony phenomenon in loanwords. Based on the analysis throughout this dissertation, I claim that Uyghur harmony process is non-directional in nature and it involves a relativized locality based on contrastiveness.