Consonant harmony in Nilotic: contrastive specifications and Stratal OT
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through analyses of dental harmony in four Nilotic languages, this paper argues both for contrastive representations and for a stratal version of Optimality Theory. Dholuo, Päri, Shilluk and Anywa all have dental harmony patterns which bar the co-occurrence of dental and alveolar segments. Details of the dental harmony patterning vary between languages and are tied to contrasts in the inventory. In Anywa, harmony is non-structure-preserving and an allophonic dental nasal surfaces in harmonic forms. This pattern can be analyzed in a stratal model of OT but leads to a ranking paradox if only a single level of evaluation is used. Further support for a stratal analysis can be found in the interaction between harmony and consonant mutation processes in the four languages. In Dholuo, harmony applies at the stem level and consonant mutation results in disharmonic surface forms in morphologically complex words. In Anywa, harmony applies later, at the word level, and words formed through consonant mutation must obey the dental harmony restrictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".