Votic: palatalization and raising/fronting

The following example from Votic (Russia) illustrates one way in which the account of phonological alternations can be made tractable by analyzing the alternations in terms of the interaction between independent phonological processes. In these examples, [ɫ] represents a velarized l.

The first group of examples (1a) shows that the nominative has no suffix, and the partitive has the suffix [-a] or [-æ] (the choice depends on the preceding vowels, determined by a vowel harmony rule according to which a suffix vowel is front if the preceding vowel is front – the rule skips over the vowel [i], but if there are no vowels other than [i] preceding, the harmony rule turns the suffix vowel into a front vowel). The second group of examples (1b) illustrates roots which have /i/ as the underlying final vowel of the root. The nouns in the third group (1c) illustrate a phenomenon of final vowel raising and fronting (which we have previously seen in closely related Finnish), whereby e and ǝ become [i] word-finally.

The essential difference between the examples of (1b) and (1c) is that the forms in (1b) underlyingly end in the vowel /i/, and those in (1c) end in /e/ or /ǝ/. In the last set of examples (1d), the noun root underlyingly ends in the sequence /kǝ/, which can be seen directly in kurkǝ-a. However, the final CV of the root appears as [t ʃ i] in the nominative kurt ʃ i.

It would be unrevealing to posit a rule changing word-final /kǝ#/ into [t ʃ i#] in one step. A problem with such a rule is that the change of a velar to a palatal conditioned by following word-final schwa is not a process found in other languages, and depends on a very specific conjunction of facts, that is, not just schwa, but word-final schwa. You may not know at this point that such a rule is not found in other languages – part of learning about phonology is learning what processes do exist in languages, something you will have a better basis for judging. What you can see right now is that such a rule treats it as a coincidence that the underlying final schwa actually becomes [i] on the surface by an independently necessary rule, so that much of the supposed rule applying to /kǝ#/ is not actually specific to /kǝ#/.

This alternation makes more sense once it is decomposed into the two constituent rules which govern it, namely final raising (independently motivated by the data in (c)). Applying this rule alone to final /kǝ/ would result in the sequence [ki]. However, [ki] is not an allowed CV sequence in this language, and a process of palatalization takes place, in accordance with the following rule:

We can thus account for the change of underlying /kurkǝ/ and /ǝɫkǝ/ to [kurtʃ i] and [ǝɫt ʃ i] by applying these two rules in a specific order, where the rule of vowel raising applies before palatalization, so that vowel raising is allowed to create occurrences of the vowel [i], and those derived cases of [i] condition the application of palatalization.

You should take note of two points regarding how the palatalization rule is formalized. First, by strictly making a velar consonant become [+cor], the result would be a velarized retroflex stop [ʈ γ ]: such sounds simply do not exist in the language, in fact the [-ant] coronal sounds of the language are all alveopalatal, and the alveopalatal stops in Votic are all affricates. Observed [t ʃ ] is the closest segment of the language to [ʈ γ ].

Second, we do not have direct evidence that all front vowels trigger the change of velars, in fact we only have direct evidence that word-final [i] triggers the change. At the same time, we do not have any direct evidence that it matters whether the triggering vowel is word-final or not, nor do we have any evidence that the other front vowels [y ø e æ] fail to trigger the change. Because there is no evidence for adding restrictions to the rule, we follow the general scientific principle of stating the rule as simply as possible, consistent with the data.