Yucatec Maya Vowel Alternations Harmony as Syntagmatic Identity

Abstract

In this paper, I will give a detailed account of vowel harmony, disharmony, dissimilation, and elision in Yucatec Maya. These phenomena provide insights for the treatment of assimilation in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). The theoretical topics to be dealt with are (i) an adequate formalisation of phonological feature assimilation within Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995), and (ii) an account of morpheme-specific alternations within this framework. I will argue that harmony, or assimilation in general, surfaces due to a Faithfulness constraint family, ‘Syntagmatic Identity’, which establishes a correspondence relation between segmental or prosodic entities of the same type within one representation. © 2001, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved.