Menominee vowel harmony revisited: A height-based underspecification account
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Algonquian language Menominee has a vowel harmony process that raises /e, o/ to /i, u/ when a high vowel follows anywhere in the word. Importantly, an intervening /ae/ blocks harmony, but /a/ does not. The prevailing ATR-based analysis of this process entails an arguably distorted view of the Menominee vowel system and requires a stipulation to explain the asymmetrical blocking properties of the low vowels. As an alternative, I propose an underspecification analysis that is less stipulative and more phonetically natural, as it employs height rather than ATR. The analysis follows from the contrastive structure of the vowel system inherited from Proto-Algonquian, thus situating Menominee harmony in a broader analytical framework and providing continuity with the analysis of other Algonquian vowel systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".