Přednáška: Syntactic Limits on Phonological Dominance

Dominant-Recessive Vowel Harmony pattern is one in which vowels in a given language are divided into two classes, and where a morpheme with an underlyingly dominant vowel causes all underlyingly recessive vowels in the word to shift to their dominant counterpart. Dominant-Recessive systems are thus neither directional nor exclusively root-controlled. The dominant feature may be introduced by a root or by an affix, and may spread from right-to-left or left-to right. Interestingly, it has been claimed that dominant prefixes are cross-linguistically unattested (Hall et al. 1974, Baković 2000, Moskal 2015). In this talk, we suggest an account rooted in syntax: the proposal is that certain aspects of the phonological representation are fixed at a syntactically-determined point in the derivation (the first phase), and subsequent operations are restricted in the types of phonological change they may impose on the output of prior cycles. We compare our account to an alternative cyclic account of other types of vowel harmony in Stratal OT (Kiparsky to appear).