Abstract
Following the demise of the SPE theory of phonology, little attention was paid to how rules should be formulated. Instead, there was a general trend to minimize the language-specific component of a grammar, to factor out recurring patterns and state them as independent constraints or parameters. The richer representations of autosegmental phonology additionally led to uncertainty in rule formulation, primarily because of questions about what the correct representations are, but also because specifying dominance and precedence relations is more complex than just specifying precedence relations.
 
 This paper discusses a vowel harmony rule in the Bantu language Logoori, which is blocked by an intervening geminate consonant. It is typologically surprising that an intervening geminate has an effect on harmony, and there is no clear model for how such an effect in a rule should be encoded. It is shown that the effect follows naturally from correctly formalizing the rule, with attention to how rule and representational substrings are matched, and no rule-external conditions on the rule are necessary.
Highlights
In early generative phonology, exemplified by SPE (Chomsky & Halle, 1968), phonological rules were formalized according to a specific theory of rules and an associated algorithm for matching rules to strings
In the post-SPE era, the practice of fully formalizing rules fell into desuetude, especially with the rise of strong substantive concepts in Universal Grammar, concepts such as markedness, structure preservation, surface constraints, and other aspects of rule operation, where various aspects of a rule’s actions could be removed from the formal statement of the rule, and stated separately: the classical example is feature-identity conditions, which might be expresed via an independent device, the Obligatory Contour Principle
The purpose of this paper is to present and analyze a fact pattern from the phonology of the Bantu language Logoori, and to demonstrate a fact about phonological analysis that should be self-evident, which is that precise rule formulation matters
Summary
In early generative phonology, exemplified by SPE (Chomsky & Halle, 1968), phonological rules were formalized according to a specific theory of rules and an associated algorithm for matching rules to strings. The predominant practice was that rule statements would explicitly encode whatever the relevant factual generalizations are within the rule, given a theory of rule formalism. This was not difficult to do, since. In the post-SPE era, the practice of fully formalizing rules fell into desuetude, especially with the rise of strong substantive concepts in Universal Grammar, concepts such as markedness, structure preservation, surface constraints, and other aspects of rule operation, where various aspects of a rule’s actions could be removed from the formal statement of the rule, and stated separately: the classical example is feature-identity conditions, which might be expresed via an independent device, the Obligatory Contour Principle. The fact of interest is that the language has a leftward vowel height harmony rule, which does not apply across a geminate consonant. Adding theoretical devices always requires justification even if the devices are attributed to Universal Grammar, and making do with fewer theoretical resources is always a virtue
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