From Sequence Frequencies to Conditions in Bantu Vowel Harmony: Building a Grammar from the Ground Up

Abstract

SUMMARY We explore here the hypothesis that phonological grammars are emergent, formed by general principles that may involve little to no role for language-specific principl es. Our basic proposal is that grammars develop from the identification of patterns of similarity, the calcu lation of frequencies of patterns of co-occurrence, and the development of generalized symbolic systems based on frequency data. We investigate six Bantu languages, all of which exhibit a canonical asymmetric height harmony pattern. Based on sizeable online databases, we examine the frequency of all possible vowel sequences in the six languages, using the frequency data to develop a nascent grammar for height harmony in each language. Our proposal is for a type of unsupervised learning, and we discuss various ways of establishing that the learning algorithm has converged on the correct grammar.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 84 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.