The contrastive hierarchy in phonology 2009 Dresher.pdf - CUNY ...

8.2. A perceptual-functional account of labial harmony triggers?
In §7.4.3 I showed that typological surveys of labial (or rounding) harmony in
Manchu-Tungus, Mongolian, and Turkic languages support the hypothesis that
only contrastive features trigger harmony. In particular, I showed that labial
harmony triggers could be shown to be contrastive, given a contrastive hierarchy
for vowels that orders [labial] ahead of [coronal]. This ordering appears to be
quite stable in these language families, though it is not universal. Moreover, the
differences between typical labial harmony triggers in Manchu-Tungus and
Mongolian on one side, and in Turkic languages on the other, could be related to
their different inventories, and different contrastive representations.
Kaun (1995) proposes what appears to be an alternative to a contrastive
account of labial harmony systems, one that is grounded in a perceptual-
functional analysis. Closer inspection reveals, however, that her account
presupposes a contrastive analysis such as the one presented here.
According to Kaun (1995), labial harmony is governed by a number of
constraints. The main ones relevant to the present discussion are given in (8.1).
(8.1) Constraints responsible for labial harmony (Kaun 1995)
a. EXTEND[RD]: The autosegment [+round] must be associated to
all available vocalic positions within a word.
b. EXTEND[RD]IF[–HI]: The autosegment [+round] must be
associated to all available vocalic positions within a word when
simultaneously associated with [–high].
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