Geminate blockage in Logoori harmony with no added machinery

Abstract

Following the demise of the SPE theory of phonology, little attention was paid to how rules should be formulated. Instead, there was a general trend to minimize the language-specific component of a grammar, to factor out recurring patterns and state them as independent constraints or parameters. The richer representations of autose­gmental phonology additionally led to uncertainty in rule formulation, primarily because of questions about what the correct representations are, but also because specifying dominance and precedence relations is more complex than just specifying precedence relations. This paper discusses a vowel harmony rule in the Bantu language Logoori, which is blocked by an intervening gemi­nate consonant. It is typologically surprising that an intervening geminate has an effect on harmony, and there is no clear model for how such an effect in a rule should be encoded. It is shown that the effect follows naturally from correctly formalizing the rule, with attention to how rule and representational substrings are matched, and no rule-external conditions on the rule are necessary.