Dissertation - Michael Becker

3.4.4 Vowel harmony and [o]-licensingThe analysis presented here used two constraints to enforce the licensing of [o] by astressed syllable, locally and at a distance. This approach was inspired by Hayes & Londe(2006), who find a similar case of exceptional action at a distance in Hungarian vowelharmony. This approach, however, is not in line with most work on vowel harmony inOptimality Theory.More commonly, vowel harmony is enforced by constraints that require features to beexpressed over several segments, described in terms of auto-segmental spreading or bysome other kind of structure, such as spans (McCarthy 2004) or domains (Cassimjee &Kisseberth 1998). An additional constraint, REALIZE, penalizes the expression of a featureon two non-adjacent segments, skipping a middle segment 16 (Cassimjee & Kisseberth1998). The Hebrew case can certainly be described in those terms, as in the followingderivation of olam-ót (111).(111)olam MASC + {im MASC , ot FEM } HARMONY REALIZE φ-MATCHa. olam-ím *!b. ☞ olam-ót * *The constraint HARMONY states that an [o] must be structurally associated with thestressed syllable, either by being auto-segmentally linked to a stressed [o] or by being insome other kind of structure that includes any [o] and the stressed vowel. The constraintREALIZE requires that all the elements in the domain of harmony realize the harmonicfeature, i.e. it penalizes any non-[o] vowels inside the structure that imposes harmony.16 See below for further discussion of skipping.109