Uyghur disharmony without diacritics
(or, Phonological representations are phonological)

B. Elan Dresher, Daniel Currie Hall, William J. Idsardi & Eric Raimy

LSA 2024

We present an events, features, and precedence (Idsardi 2022, Papillon 2020, Raimy 2000) analysis of disharmony effects in Uyghur vowel harmony (Hall & Ozburn 2019, Mayer, McCollum & Eziz 2022, Mayer, Major & Yakup 2022) in response to analyses positing diacritic exception markers. Our proposed analysis accounts for both harmonic and disharmonic forms using only phonological representations without resource to diacritic exception markers. This eliminates the proliferation of arbitrary non-phonological information in the phonology. We also demonstrate how the learning theory behind the abstract "strong i" in Inuit (Compton & Dresher 2011) will lead a learner to the proposed analysis.