Harmonia vocàlicaparàmetres i variació

Zusammenfassung

Vowel harmony is an assimilatory phenomenon that, in general, offers articulatory benefits to the speaker and provides perceptual benefits for the listener, although these gains bring about the weakening or even the loss of certain underlying properties of the harmonized vowels. Consequently, the parameters that control the spread of the features must determine, in each case, which causes favour the homogenization in spite of the concomitant loss of information. The aim of this study is, with examples taken from the Romance languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, to review some of the characteristics shared by the different attested phenomena of vowel harmony, in order to establish a typology of patterns of harmony.