Idiosyncratically Transparent Vowels in Kazakh

Abstract

Idiosyncratically transparent vowels -- those that fail to either undergo or trigger harmony in a particular morpheme but do both elsewhere -- have not been documented in any language, and have been claimed to be impossible as recently as Mahanta (2012). We present two affixes in Kazakh that contain idiosyncratic vowels, and present evidence from wordlist elicitations and phonetic studies with two native speakers from different regions. We discuss the implications of these findings for constraint-based theories of vowel harmony: we show that they cannot be readily analyzed in conventional strictly-local harmony system, and present analyses in two recent systems that allow for non-local representations. Both Rhodes's (2010) system for vowel harmony in Agreement by Correspondence and Kimper's (2011) Trigger Competition can be made to accommodate lexical specifications that force vowels in particular morphemes to act as transparent, and we show that implementing these lexical specifications in Trigger Competition forces us to make somewhat stronger predictions about the rarity of idiosyncratic transparency.