Resumen de Vowel harmony in Persian
Persian is a language with several types of vowel harmony. This paper applies Optimality Theory (henceforth OT) to analyze this phonological process which includes various types of regressive and progressive vowel harmony in different words and expressions, as well as translaryngeal harmony and parasitism. It offers various examples whose trigger or target does not exist in the underlying representation and is therefore created in an intermediate representation. It discusses how backness harmony feeds height harmony in English loanwords. It also discusses blockers and exceptionality. The latter is analyzed using Pater's Lexically Specific Constraint Theory. It also addresses two cases of opacity in feeding and counterfeeding interactions. The main contribution of this paper is that it presents a set of empirical data on Persian vowel harmony and OT analyses which are of general theoretical interest.
