Phrasal Vowel Harmony

Abstract This short chapter surveys phonological and morphosyntactic parameters conditioning cross-word vowel harmony (VH) and illustrates select parameters by providing details of the VH systems of Gua, Vata, Kinande, Somali, and Wolof. It concludes with arguments for why cross-word harmony must be considered a phonological, not a phonetic, phenomenon. VH is typically claimed to be word bound, and the ‘word’ is usually taken to refer to the phonological word, not the grammatical word, since compounds are often disharmonic. Indeed, VH has been claimed to rarely cross lexical word boundaries, either within compounds or within phrases. However, it is not difficult to find languages where VH applies in a domain larger than the prosodic or grammatical word.