Vowel harmony results from a set of restrictions that determine the possible and impossible sequences of vowels within a word. The study of syntax begins with the observation that the words of a sentence cannot go in just any order, and the study of phonology begins with the same observation for the consonants and vowels of a word. This book investigates long-distance relations between vowels in vowel harmony systems across a range of languages, with the aim of demonstrating that the locality conditions which regulate these relations can be attributed to the same principle that regulates long- ... More

Vowel harmony results from a set of restrictions that determine the possible and impossible sequences of vowels within a word. The study of syntax begins with the observation that the words of a sentence cannot go in just any order, and the study of phonology begins with the same observation for the consonants and vowels of a word. This book investigates long-distance relations between vowels in vowel harmony systems across a range of languages, with the aim of demonstrating that the locality conditions which regulate these relations can be attributed to the same principle that regulates long-distance syntactic dependencies. It argues that vowel harmony represents a manifestation of the Agree algorithm for feature-valuation (formulated by Noam Chomsky in 2000), as part of an overarching effort to show that phonology can be described in terms of the principles of the Minimalist Program. The book demonstrates that the principle of target-driven search, the phenomenon of defective intervention, and the principles regulating the size of the domain over which dependencies are computed apply to both phonological and syntactic phenomena. It offers phonologists new evidence that viewing vowel harmony through the lens of relativized minimality has the potential to unify different levels of linguistic representation and different domains of empirical inquiry in a unified framework. Moreover, the book’s specific implementation of the locality of dependencies represents a major advance in understanding constraints on possible harmonic languages.