The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony

This handbook provides a detailed account of the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a pattern according to which all vowels within a word must agree for some phonological property or properties. Vowel harmony has been central in the development of phonological theories thanks to its cluster of remarkable properties, notably its typically ’unbounded’ character and its non-locality, and because it forms part of the phonology of most world languages. The five parts of this volume cover all aspects of vowel harmony from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Part I outlines the types of vowel harmony and some unusual cases, before Part II explores structural issues such as vowel inventories, the interaction of vowel harmony and morphological structure, and locality. The chapters in Part III provide an overview of the various theoretical accounts of the phenomenon, as well as bringing in insights from language acquisition and psycholinguistics, while Part IV focuses on the historical life cycle of vowel harmony, looking at topics such as phonetic factors and the effect of language contact. The final part contains 31 chapters that present data and analysis of vowel harmony across all major language families as well as several isolates, constituting the broadest coverage of the phenomenon to date.

Nancy A. Ritter, Adjunct Professor of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, Harry van der Hulst, Professor of Linguistics, University of Connecticut

Nancy A. Ritter is Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. Her research has focused on exploring phonological phenomena from a cognitive perspective and she is currently developing an approach to analysing classical ballet using methods of linguistic analysis and concepts from cognitive science. She is managing and review editor for The Linguistic Review.

Harry van der Hulst is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut, where he specializes in phonology. He has been Editor-in-Chief of The Linguistic Review since 1990 and is co-editor of the Mouton de Gruyter series ’Studies in Generative Grammar’. He is the author of Asymmetries in Vowel Harmony (OUP, 2018), and co-editor of The Oxford History of Phonology (with B. Elan Dresher; OUP, 2022) and Word Prominence in Languages with Complex Morphologies (with Ksenia Bogomolets; OUP, 2023).