Abstract
This paper discusses vowel harmony; a type of assimilatory process in Gurene (Mabia language), within the Autosegmental phonology framework (Goldsmith 1976, 1990, Clements 1977). The phenomenon exists in many African languages and has received descriptive analyses in previous studies on Gurene (see Azagesiba 1977, Dakubu 1996, Nsoh 1997, Adongo 2008). These works were however limited in scope and lacked theoretical grounding. This paper employs the feature spreading approach within Autosegmental phonology to characterise cases in which segments share the same specifications or assimilate to a feature or a group of features (Ewen V from CVCV to multisyllabic words. Even though there are cases when harmony is blocked and does not operate across word boundaries particularly in compounds, the paper established that many Gurene loanwords and compounds are governed by vowel harmony rules. We also found out that the language has vowel-consonant harmony and rounding harmony.
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