Doubly Triggered Harmony in Laal as Subphonemic Agreement by Correspondence

Abstract

Multiple-trigger assimilations pose notoriously difficult problems to standard autosegmental analyses (Flemming 1997). I present the unusual double-trigger rounding harmony of Laal (unclassified, Chad), where V₁ in a disyllabic stem assimilates in rounding to a same-height round V₂, iff the root contains a labial consonant. I show that Agreement-by-Correspondence, initially developed for consonant agreement (Hansson 2001, Rose & Walker 2004), recently extended to vowel harmony (Rhodes 2012), consonant-tone interaction (Shih 2013), and harmony processes involving contour segments and tones (Inkelas & Shih 2013), can account for multiple-trigger assimilations such as that of Laal, provided it can access subphonemic phonetic information.