Vahid Sadeghi; Abbas Delavari
Abstract
This article addresses vowel harmony in Hamedani Turkish Within the framework of different models of optimality theory including Feature alignment, Local Agreement, Spread, Span, and ...
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This article addresses vowel harmony in Hamedani Turkish Within the framework of different models of optimality theory including Feature alignment, Local Agreement, Spread, Span, and Agreement-By-Correspondence. A corpus of related data was gathered and pronounced by 30 native speakers of Hamedani Turkish. Examination of the data suggested that three types of harmony occur in the said dialect, namely total harmony, opaque harmony, and transparent harmony. Results obtained from analyses indicated that the Spread theory, as contrasted with other models of optimality theory, has both descriptive and explanatory adequacy to account for data of vowel harmony in Hamedani Turkish. For one thing, the model can account for any type of vowel harmony in Hamedani Turkish. On the other hand, using the markedness constraint Spead [αF], the model can explain why different processes of assimilation in the sound systems of languages serve to operate and function similarly in respect to agreement in articulatory mechanisms.
