What is it about?

This paper is about vowel harmony in the Stau language.

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Why is it important?

First article focusing on vowel harmony in a Rgyalrongic language. Understanding vowel harmony in Stau helps us understand constraints on which vowels can co-occur. Notable among the mechanisms that block vowel harmony are lexemes that contain semantically-heavy first syllables. In this situation, we observe the interplay of semantics and phonology. Analysis of the vowel harmony system in Stau yields a way to measure the distance between morphemes.

Perspectives

There are some satisfying explanations in this article for why Stau vowels show up in the patterns they do.

Jesse Gates
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

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This page is a summary of: Vowel harmony in Stau, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, December 2018, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/ltba.17016.gat.
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