Non-alternating, non-participating, and idiosyncratic vowels

Abstract

Vowel harmony usually results in a domain, such as the prosodic word, containing only vowels 8 of the same type, e.g., only front or only back vowels, to the exclusion of back or front vowels, 9 respectively. Such sequences of like vowels are often disrupted or do not span over the whole 10 domain because of vowels in the string that do not participate (van der Hulst & van de Weijer 11 1995; Baković 2000; Krämer 2003; Archangeli & Pulleyblank 2007; Rose & Walker 2011 inter 12 alia). There are several ways in which a vowel can fail to participate in vowel harmony, and 13 various explanations for these non-harmonic behaviors have been brought forward.