Harmonious Process Research Articles

The changing culture of the Hindu Lohana community in East Africa

This article describes the cultural change and adaptation of the Hindu Lohana community in East Africa. It examines changing food habits and marriage policies, both well‐known examples of the Hindu notion of ‘purity’. Initially, men of this community would marry Lohana women raised in India. Over time, however, Lohana men developed a preference for Hindu women raised in East Africa. In addition, Lohanas developed from strict vegetarians and non‐drinkers to consumers of meat and alcohol. This was not a natural, harmonious process, but one with conflicts in which painful decisions had to be made. This process of stretching and closing preferences of identity have eventually led to an Indian East African identity. To understand the creation of this identity, this article argues that there is a need to study cultural change as a local (a well‐defined geographical and historical area) and bottom‐up (using the perspective of the agent who changes, adapts, mixes, integrates or assimilates) process.

Some auditory and acoustic observations on the phonetics of [ATR] harmony in a speaker of a dialect of Kalenjin

Conventional treatments of vowel harmony processes routinely make two important assumptions: first, only vowels are implicated in the harmonic process and second, the phonologically relevant harmony features have a transparent (intrinsic) phonetic interpretation (IPI). Consonants are typically treated only insofar as they interfere with such harmony (van der Hulst & van der Weijer 1995 provide a concise overview of harmony processes and their interpretation). Phonetic data on ‘advanced tongue root’ [ATR] harmony in the Tugen dialect of Kalenjin appears to challenge both these assumptions.

Towards a typology of disharmony

We propose an OT-theoretic typology of vowel harmony systems based on a comparative study of front/back harmony. Harmony processes are governed by ag eneral constraint that imposes feature agreement on neighboring segments. Disharmonic (“neutral”) segments arise when this constraint is dominated by markedness constraints and/or by faithfulness constraints that govern segment inventories. These constraint interactions determine whether disharmonic segments are opaque or transparent, and fix the cross-linguistically diverse behavior of the latter. We make crucial use of two modes of local constraint conjunction, which are already implicit in the current theory. Our proposal restricts this theory by eliminating the possibility of freely stipulating the domain of local conjunction.

Vowel harmony, centralization, and peripherality: the case of Pasiego

Although many different cases of vowel harmony can be found in the world's languages, there is a general consensus that they can all be classified into three basic types: frontness or palatal harmony, roundness or labial harmony, and ATR or height harmony. The Northwestern Spanish dialect Pasiego, however, evinces a process of vowel harmony that clearly does not fit into any of these classes. Rather, there is every indication that it involves a process of centralization that, it will be argued, can best be captured in terms of vowel peripherality.

A connectionist word production tool for Finnish nouns with a model for vowel harmony restrictions

Vowel harmony is a pervasive feature in Finnish. It is only rarely violated in slips of the tongue or in aphasic output. Thus it is a constraint which should be successfully simulated by any model aiming to account for word production in Finnish. Only a few neural network models for Finnish language processing have been developed so far, although Finnish should be a very challenging object for modeling because of its complex morphology. Our work is the first attempt to model Finnish vowel harmony using neural networks. We have introduced a tool, FinnPro, for building interactive spreading activation models and for simulating word production processes. Our tool produces Finnish nouns in different cases and forms and simulates both normal and damaged speech. In this paper, the vowel harmony control features of FinnPro are introduced. The control structure of FinnPro maintains vowel harmony even in damaged word production. The vowel harmony adjustment process in FinnPro follows the idea that the vowel harmony process in Finnish is phonological. Our model suggests that in disturbed word productions, the vowel harmony category of the output word is triggered by the whole set of vowels activated in the production.

Vowel harmony and vowel alternation in Mayak

Like several other Western Nilotic languages, the Mayak variety of Northern Burun has two sets of vowels distinguished by the feature [ATR], the [-ATR] vowels [I, E, a, i, u] and the [+ATR] vowels [i, e, A, 0, u]. However, the mid [+ATR] vowels [e] and [o] are variants of the mid [-ATR] vowels /e/ and /i/ conditioned by a following high I+ATR] vowel. This allophony is the effect of one of four general vowel harmony processes. In addition, [-ATR) root vowels exhibit grammatically conditioned alternation which affects either [ATR] or height. The mixed character of this alternation invites the hypothesis that original mid [+ATR] vowels have merged with the high [-ATR] vowels, and this hypothesis is confirmed by a comparison of Mayak with other Western Nilotic languages.

Industrial restructuring in ASEAN and the role of Japanese foreign direct investment

Industrial development in ASEAN is closely related to structural changes and industrial adjustments taking place in the industrial countries and the other developing economies in the Asia‐Pacific region. Some activities which have been edged out or phased out in the process of industrial restructuring in Japan and the NICs have migrated to the ASEAN member countries through foreign direct investment channels. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the “flying geese” paradigm and discusses the extent to which this pattern has generated a mutually reinforcing, harmonious process of industrialisation in ASEAN.

Positional prominence and the ‘prosodic trough’ in Yaka

The issue of vowel height harmony – relatively rare in the world's languages – is one that most serious theories of phonology have addressed at one time or another, particularly as concerns its realisation in Bantu (e.g. Clements 1991, Archangeli & Pulleyblank 1994, Beckman 1997). As is quite well known, the majority of an estimated 500 Bantu languages exhibit some variant of a progressive harmony process by which vowels lower when preceded by an appropriate (lower) trigger. (Ki)-Yaka, a Western Bantu language spoken in ex-Zaire, designated as H.31 by Guthrie (1967–71), has a height harmony system which has been analysed as having a similar left-to-right lowering process. In this paper I argue against the general analysis given for Yaka, showing that this language differs in a major way from the rest of Bantu. The goals of the paper are threefold. First, I present a comprehensive treatment of the unusual vowel harmony system in (ki-)Yaka. Second, I introduce the notion of the ‘prosodic trough’ (τ), a domain which is needed in order to state important phonological generalisations in Yaka and in Bantu in general. Finally, I show the relevance of the Yaka facts for the study of positional prominence in phonology. A (partial) analysis is offered within optimality- theoretic terms, particularly as developed by McCarthy & Prince (1995). Although superficially resembling the vowel height harmony found in most Bantu languages, the Yaka system will be shown to differ from these latter in major ways. The paper is organised as follows. In §2 I establish the general nature of the Yaka harmony system, reanalysing previous accounts in terms of ‘plateauing’. In §3 I turn to the process of ‘imbrication’, which introduces a second motivation for vowel harmony: the avoidance of the sequence [wi]. A third source of vowel harmony is presented in §4, which also introduces the notion of the ‘prosodic trough’. The study ends with a brief conclusion in §5 and an appendix that discusses outstanding problems.

Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese By Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor (review)

376LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) and nonperipheral. These classes define themselves in English dialects by their differential behavior in ongoing processes of sound change. The peripheral vowels in general rise while the nonperipheral ones fall. In addition, for American English, at least, the peripheral vowels have all developed colored off-glides (the source of the infamous IyI and /w/ glides in the TragerSmith transcription), while the nonperipheral ones have in general developed colorless s-offglides : 'bead' [biid] vs. 'bid' [bisd], for example. Similarly, in Quebec French the high vowels [i,y,u] have developed lax counterparts [i, y, u] in closed syllables, and a process of lax harmony spreads the lax feature leftwards across the rest of the word: abusif [abY'zif] 'abusive', inutile [my'tsil] 'useless'. The close relationship between vowels that appear to be adjacent in height 'within a zone' (much as we find between related members of the major articulatory zones) suggests that there is a single feature controlling this relationship, and tense/lax still seems the best available suggestion, despite the unease of the phonetics community. With the exception ofthe issue oftenseness, I am unable to present a single significant criticism ofthis book. On the back ofthe paperback edition John Goldsmith, Michael Kenstowicz, William Hardcastle, and W. Barry are all quoted praising this book as something that needs to be on everyone's bookshelf. I can only endorse the nomination. REFERENCES Halle, Morris. 1983. On distinctive features and their articulatory implementation. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1.91-105. Hurch, Bernhard. 1988. Über aspiration: Ein Kapitel aus der natürlichen Phonologie. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change. Volume 1: Internal factors. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell . Lindblom, Björn, and Ian Maddieson. 1988. Phonetic universale in consonant systems. Language, speech and mind: Studies in honor of Victoria A. Fromkin, ed. by Larry Hyman and Charles Li, 62-80. London and New York: Routledge. McCarthy, John. 1988. Feature geometry and depency: A review. Phonetica 45:84-108. Nathan, Geoffrey S. 1989. Preliminaries to a theory of phonological substance: The substance of sonority. Linguistic categorization, ed. by Roberta Corrigan, Fred Eckman, and Michael Noonan, 55-67. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. -----. 1995. How the phoneme inventory gets its shape—cognitive grammar' s view of phonological systems. Rivista di Lingüistica 6.275-88. Sagey, Elizabeth. 1990. The representation of features in non-linear phonology: The articulator node hierarchy . New York: Garland. Stevens, Kenneth. 1989. On the quantal nature of speech. Journal of Phonetics 17.3-46. ----- and Samuel Jay Keyser. 1989. Primary features and their enhancement in consonants. Language 65.81-106. Department of Linguistics Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL 62901-4517 [geoffn@siu.edu] Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese. By Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995. Pp. 412. $68.00. Reviewed by Mary S. Erbaugh, City University of Hong Kong Chinese characters are called hanzi in China, kanji in Japan, and hancha in Korea. About twothirds of characters contain phonetic elements which Chinese speakers find accessible enough to read and write exclusively in characters. Non-Chinese-speakers, Koreans, and Japanese who borrowed the classical Chinese script a millennium ago have developed highly efficient syllabaries to supplement the characters, which are still used for a decreasing number of culturally REVIEWS377 important content words as well as many proper names. Insup Taylor, Korean-born and also fluent in Japanese, enlisted M. Martin Taylor in taking on two huge, rich topics: the psycholinguistics of reading characters in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean; and the historical sociolinguistics ofliteracy in those languages. No other work compares to this in depth, scope, or in the richness of its primary sources in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English. The authors argue strongly for the efficiency of characters . Characters, they say, should be strengthened and retained, not only in China but in Korea and Japan as well, especially if they are systematically selected and 'streamlined'. I. Taylor is a member of the Comparative Literacy Project in the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology , but the book refutes McLuhan's 1962 statement, 'Cultures can rise far above civilization artistically, but without the phonetic alphabet they remain...

Processes of vowel harmony in the Servigliano dialect of Italian: A comparison of two non-linear proposals for the representation of vowel height

Processes of vowel harmony in the Servigliano dialect of Italian: A comparison of two non-linear proposals for the representation of vowel height

Modernism, postmodernism, and neo-confucian thinking: A critical history of paradigm shifts and values in academic psychology*

Cleavages between modern and postmodern paradigms are evident in all academic disciplines. The modernist search for natural laws and unified theory using impartial methods is undermined by the postmodernist critique that reality is socially constructed. We review this conflict in the context of paradigm shifts in psychology, which we argue are social rather than scientific revolutions, leading to a non-cumulative discipline where objectivity is preached yet subjectivity dictates many practices. Disputes over paradigms are couched in epistemology but center also around differences in values. The insight offered by neo-Confucian philosophers is that values have an ontological basis that cannot empirically derived. Li-i-fen-shu (one principle, many manifestations) and t'ien-jen-ho-i (heaven and humanity in union) form a value system with breadth and depth for the social sciences. Li-i-fen-shu allows multiple methods of inquiry and multiple manifestations of cultural reality to derive from one source. T'ien-jen-ho-i relates each act and actor to holistic processes of nature and interpersonal harmony. Together, they provide a perspective on science and meaning with the potential of synthesizing insights from different paradigms in psychology and other social sciences.

Best-Practice Taylorism: 'Yankee Speed-Up' in Australian Grocery Distribution

Contrary to prevailing visions of workplace reform as a harmonious and benefi cial process, this paper examines the case of the Australian grocery distribution industry and recent changes in work organization imported from the United States. Unlike the consensual `team-based' approaches that have been advocated within recent management literature, 'international best practice' in this industry equates to a system of labour management based upon low trust and direct control. The paper highlights the variability of workplace reform and the continued centrality of management control over the labour process.

The representation of glottals in Oromo

In current phonological feature theories, the behaviour of glottals poses serious problems for their representation. The special status of / h / and /? / which are often transparent to vowel harmony processes (cf. Steriade 1987; McCarthy 1991, forthcoming; Stemberger 1993), has led to the hypothesis that, at least in some languages, they lack a place node. The representation of ejectives and implosives, though, is very rarely discussed in the literature. On phonetic grounds, the main difference between plain stops and ejectives and implosives is the airstream mechanism used during their realisation, the former having a pulmonic egressive airstream while the latter involve a supplementary glottal constriction, which may accompany either egressive airflow, as in ejectives, or ingressive, as in implosives.

Glottal transparency

Glottal consonants (/h/ and /?/) often have a special status that has led to the hypothesis that they are underspecified for both consonant and vowel place of articulation features. There is an alternative acoustically based explanation for the special status that, while workable, is valued less highly in linguistic theory. This alternative hypothesis can be ruled out only with data where the relevant acoustic phenomena are not contained in the input to be learned. I address four processes of consonant and vowel harmony in the speech of three children learning English, where the alternative hypothesis cannot account for the data. I conclude that glottals are underspecified for consonant and vowel place of articulation features, and that they lack the node in feature geometry that immediately dominates such features (either the Place node or an Oral node).

Variability in feature dependency: The case of nasality

Nasal harmony patterns differ in terms of the segments that are transparent, opaque or targets. Typical analyses attribute the differences to idiosyncratic restrictions on rules. This paper argues for an alternative approach according to which differences follow from the organization of the feature [nasal]. Two options are proposed, yielding two fundamentally different harmony types. In one type, [nasal] is a dependent of the Soft Palate node, and harmony is transmitted by spreading the superordinate node. In the second type, the harmony process spreads the features [nasal], which is organized as a dependent of a node, Spontaneous Voicing, present in sonorants. A salient difference between the two types is the absence of opaque segments in the latter, while in the former, nasal spreading is always arrested by a consonant. The two harmony types really reflect a typological distinction between languages that manifest a nasal-oral contrast within the class of [+consonantal] segments and those in which a similar contrast is restricted either to vowels or to sonorant consonants. The sonorant consonants often include prenasalized stops.

Another Look at Coeur d'Alene Harmony

1. Much of the work done on Coeur d'Alene (Salish) since the publication of Reichard's (1938) comprehensive grammar has focused on the analysis of the complex retracting harmonies in this language (Cole 1987:77-103, Johnson 1975, and Sloat 1966; 1971; 1972; 1980). These efforts have resulted in a much clearer picture of the harmony processes than that presented by Reichard but still inadequately explain the data. In this paper, I make use of recent developments in phonological theory to provide a complete account of Coeur d'Alene harmony, demonstrating that what were thought to be irregularities are in fact the result of regular phonological rules applying to underspecified vowels. The analysis depends on a nonterminal Pharyngeal node (McCarthy 1988) in the feature hierarchy (Sagey 1986) which may be used to specify primary or secondary articulation. In 2, I present a brief description of the Coeur d'Alene vowels and the effects of the harmony processes; in 3, I review the various analyses that have been published and discuss the production of retracted segments; in 4, I describe the harmony processes; and in 5, I examine a number of forms that have proved difficult to account for in other analyses.

The Experience of Laughing at Oneself in Older Couples

An exploratory study was undertaken to investigate the experience of laughing at oneself as described by older couples. The descriptions generated were viewed through the perspective of Rogers' science of unitary human beings. Laughing at oneself, described in the literature as a liberating, transcendent experience, was proposed as a form of knowing participation in the process of health patterning. Using guide questions developed from the study's objectives, the researcher interviewed twenty English-speaking couples, ages 52-82 who were living in their own homes. Transcribed interviews were searched for themes following the analysis-synthesis procedure outlined by Parse, Coyne, and Smith (1985). Themes were identified in the language of the participants then synthesized into the language of the researcher. The hypothesis that flowed from the data reflected evolving mutual field patterning, awareness of the harmonious mutual process, and descriptions of integrality and well-being. Implications for practice and research are presented.

The Role of Trigger-Target Similarity in the Vowel Harmony Process

Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1990), pp. 140-152

Vowel harmony in Palestinian Arabic: a metrical perspective

Previous work on vowel harmony (VH) in Palestinian Arabic (PA), particularly Kenstowicz (1981), has shown that this process is more adequately expressed in autosegmental than in linear terms, since the former permits the two otherwise uncollapsible regressive and progressive harmony processes to be stated in a single unified rule. The present study complements that autosegmental analysis. It shows that the autosegmental rule of VH in PA is constrained simultaneously by metrical and segmental boundaries. That is, high front vowels acquire the feature [+round] only if they are dominated by a foot marked [+round] and if they occur within the segmental domain of VH which comprises the stem and the preceding prefixes.

Vowel harmony in Akan a consideration of Stewarts word structure conditions

Stewart [1983] presents a new framework for the analysis of Akan vowel harmony in which Word Structure Conditions (WSCs) are introduced to account for word-level phonotactic regularities. It is shown here that the WSCs, rather than simplifying the analysis of Akan, impose unnecessary complexity on it, requiring us to restate the unitary process of vowel harmony as a number of formally unrelated rules. It is concluded that with one further modification, the analysis of Clements [1981] can be maintained.