Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) harmony is one of the most widely studied phonological phenomena in African languages. Vowels in ATR harmony systems are divided into two sets ([+ATR] and [-ATR]) and must typically agree for one or the other feature. Despite decades of research, ATR harmony systems continue to raise fundamental questions about how vowel inventories are structured, what governs the directionality and domain of harmony, and why certain vowels resist participating in the process.

This course provides an introduction to ATR harmony, covering both its phonetic foundations and its phonological behavior. We begin with the articulatory and acoustic basis of the ATR distinction and the relationship between ATR and related features like height and RTR. We then turn to the typology of ATR vowel inventories, the distinction between dominant-recessive and stem-controlled systems, and the strong correlation between inventory structure and which ATR value functions as dominant. The second half of the course addresses directionality, locality, and the behavior of the low vowel /a/ specifically, which frequently resists full participation in ATR harmony for reasons that are both articulatory and phonological. The final session introduces some of the more unusual patterns attested in ATR harmony systems, including cases where the outcome of harmony depends on non-local information.

Tentative Reading list:

Casali, R. 2008. ATR harmony in African languages. Language and Linguistics Compass 2(3): 496–549.

Casali, R. 2016. Some inventory-related asymmetries in the patterning of tongue root harmony systems. Studies in African Linguistics 45(1&2): 1–43. (class 2)

Dimmendaal, G. J. 2002. Constraining disharmony in Nilotic: What does an optimal system look like? Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 23: 153–181.

Gick, B., D. Pulleyblank, F. Campbell & N. Mutaka. 2006. Low vowels and transparency in Kinande vowel harmony. Phonology 23: 1–20.

Hyman, L. 2002. Is there a right-to-left bias in vowel harmony? In Proceedings of the 9th International Phonology Meeting. Vienna.

McCollum, Adam; Eric Baković, and Anna Mai. accepted. On the inevitability of non-myopic harmony. Phonology.

Rose, S. 2018. ATR vowel harmony: New patterns and diagnostics. In Proceedings of AMP 2017. Linguistic Society of America.

Wilson, C. 2003. Analyzing unbounded spreading with constraints: Marks, targets, and derivations. Unpublished ms., UCLA.