Vowel Harmony: Statistical Methods for Linguistic Analysis
Date
2012
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Producer
Director
Performer
Choreographer
Costume Designer
Music
Videographer
Lighting Designer
Set Designer
Crew Member
Funder
Rehearsal Director
Concert Coordinator
Advisor
Moderator
Panelist
Alternative Title
Department
Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
Type
Thesis (B.A.)
Original Format
Running Time
File Format
Place of Publication
Date Span
Copyright Date
Award
The Linguistics Prize in Linguistic Theory
Language
en_US
Note
Table of Contents
Terms of Use
Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
Rights Holder
Access Restrictions
Terms of Use
Tripod URL
Identifier
Abstract
Vowel harmony, a phonological pattern in which vowels within a given domain are
required to agree in properties such as tongue position or lip rounding, is a fascinating
and fairly widespread phenomenon in the world's languages. Languages vary in their
vowel harmony typologies, as well as the extent to which vowel harmony as a
phonological constraint is violable. Simple statistical methods can capture interesting
facets of vowel harmony systems, as well as provide a way of quantifying vowel
harmony so that harmonic systems can be compared. This thesis aims to compare a
number of statistical machine learning and natural language processing methods for
vowel harmony, culminating in the presentation of a unified tool for visualizing and
"diagnosing" vowel harmony systems from data in an unsupervised manner.