B4 Vowel harmony: Original symposium call
Vowel harmony is considered to be a feature typical of Uralic languages. Vowel harmony (front/back) is reconstructed for Proto-Uralic, Proto-Samoyedic and Proto-Finno-Ugric. Many of the contemporary Uralic languages have preserved vowel harmony, although although the pattern has changed compared to the original (reconstructed) one. Other languages have lost the original vowel harmony, but some of these have developed a new vowel harmony system. Sometimes there are considerable differences between the dialects of the same language.
Our knowledge of vowel harmony in Uralic languages is very limited. There is only sporadic information available in handbooks on various Uralic languages. Therefore we invite papers on the following topics:
From a historical perspective:
- emergence, development and disappearance of vowel harmony systems;
- reconstructing vowel harmony for earlier (undocumented) stages of language history;
- vowel harmony in linguistic records (archives, databases, etc): problems and possibilities of analysis.
From a dialectological perspective:
- detailed description of vowel harmony in specific dialects;
- comparative description of vowel harmony systems in different dialects of the same language.
From a sociolinguistic perspective:
- vowel harmony and language death: vowel harmony in the language of semi-speakers;
- vowel harmony in indicating style, register etc.
From the perspective of language contact:
- phenomena in vowel harmony that result from language contact;
- emergence, development or disappearance of vowel harmony as a result of language contact;
- areal features of vowel harmony.
From a typological perspective:
- vowel harmony in Uralic languages from a cross-linguistic point of view;
- contrastive study of vowel harmony systems in different Uralic languages.
From a theoretical perspective:
- exceptionality in harmony;
- disharmony and antiharmony;
- variation in harmony;
- neutrality in harmony;
- the domain of harmony;
- phonetic bases of harmony;
- morphological factors in vowel harmony;
- experimental studies of vowel harmony.
Papers investigating less studied Uralic languages (i.e. other than Hungarian, Finnish or Estonian) have preference.
The languages of the symposium are English and Russian. Papers based on the presentations will be published in a special number of Acta Linguistica Academica.
Organizers:
Fejes, László RIL HAS, Rebrus, Péter RIL HAS, Szigetvári, Péter ELTE ,Törkenczy, Miklós ELTE, RIL HAS
Contact person:
Fejes, László (fejes@nytud.hu)