Ebook: Vowel harmony in Qiang: an optimality theoretic account

Indiana University. — 11 p.Qiang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by approximately 110,000 people in the mountainous region of northwest Sichuan, China. The data for this analysis comes from a descriptive grammar (LaPolla & Huang, 2003) and an article on the vowel system by (Evans & Huang, 2007). The Yadu
dialect of Qiang has a complex system of vowel harmony in which vowels across morpheme boundaries agree in terms of the features: [low], [back], and [round]. This harmony does not apply to monomorphic lexical items. There is an opacity effect caused by a counterfeeding interaction between [back] and [round] harmony that will require a deviation from classic OT (Prince & Smolensky 1993-2004) and the use of LCC (Smolensky, 1997).