Harmony and disharmony in Mbat (Jarawan Bantu) verbs

Abstract

This paper is the first to describe aspects of the vocalic phonology of Mbat, a Jarawan Bantu language. Mbat exhibits a series of vowel-consonant interactions in its verbs that sometimes yield height harmony between a stem and suffixal vowel. Via this stem-controlled phenomenon, high vowels (i, u, ɪ, ʊ) harmonize across a stem-final non-dorsal sonorant while the low vowel (a) harmonizes across any stem-final dorsal. Under other conditions, these verbs appear disharmonic for height. A sixth contrastive vowel, schwa (ə), does not actively participate in harmony. I show that these otherwise straightforward generalizations on harmony vs. blocking are sometimes obscured by alternations triggered by a preceding glide that affect the stem vowel itself. I offer an analysis using a feature geometric model of vowel height. I show that an approach based on well-motivated binary vocalic features like [open], [closed], and [ATR] offers a transparent account of most Mbat outcomes. There is at least one instance, however, where these features seem unintuitive relative to the phenomena being modeled. For the sake of comparison, I discuss a possible reanalysis based on abstract features. Such an approach is unencumbered by expected phonetic correlates of vocalic features and focuses instead on featural interactions. This approach aligns itself with more recent “substance-free” approaches to phonology which assume a model of phonological computation based on features whose phonetic implementation is downstream and language-specific.