Oroch vowel harmony

Abstract

In this paper I examine vowel harmony in Oroch, a recently extinct Manchu-Tungusic language. Oroch vowels are subject to the interplay of retracted tongue root (RTR) harmony and rounding harmony. The two kinds of harmony have contrasting effects on neutral vowels. The front vowels /i/ and / æ/ are transparent to RTR harmony, while the vowels /i/, /æ/ and /u/ are opaque to rounding harmony. Crucially, if the root contains only neutral vowels /i/ and /æ/, the RTR feature of the suffix is unpredictable.This paper puts forth a Stratal OT analysis of Oroch vowel harmony, along the lines of Kiparsky (2000). The neutral vowels are assumed to be subject to RTR harmony at the word level, where the most harmonic candidate wins, but at the postlexical level there is a constraint against [i] bearing [+RTR] feature and against [æ] bearing [−RTR] feature; so on the surface the effect of RTR harmony is undone on transparent vowels. Thus, the transparency of the neutral vowels is predicted, as well as the distribution of suffixes with neutral roots, the underlying RTR specification of which spreads onto suffixes at the word level.In addition, the Stratal OT approach derives the transparency vs. opacity effects of the two harmonies while obeying strict locality, i.e. spreading is restricted to adjacent segments. This allows a more economic account of Oroch vowel harmony in terms of a small set of constraints predicting the transparency with respect to RTR harmony, opacity with respect to rounding harmony, and suffix variation with the neutral roots.