Harmony in Gitksan

What types of consonants are transparent in vowel harmony in Gitksan has been little understood. Previous studies suggest that it is translaryngeal harmony, where the qualities of unstressed suffixal vowels are harmonized with the ones of last stem vowels, apparently skipping the stem‐final laryngeal stop and laryngeal fricative [Rigsby, unpublished manuscript, University of Queensland, Australia, 1986; Rigsby and Ingram, International Journal of American Linguistics 56, 251–263 (1990)]. However, our original data show that harmony takes place when the stem‐final consonant is uvular as well. It suggests that it cannot simply be analyzed as laryngeal transparency, but it could be reanalyzed as [+low] transparency. The present study examines cross‐consonantal vowel harmony through acoustic experiment. It is predicted that there is a significant difference in formant values between the vowels across uvular or laryngeal consonants versus the ones across the other consonants. New data from an Eastern Gitksan speaker (female, 72) and its analysis will be presented. Implications for locality of vowel harmony as well as for the phonological treatment of consonantal transparency will be discussed. [Work supported by SSHRC.]