Vowel Harmony In Dagbani Dialects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A harmony system requires that two or more not-necessarily-adjacent segments must be similar or must resemble each other with respect to some feature(s). This paper examines vowel harmony in Dagbanli dialects focusing on harmony for rounding, backness and complete. The paper is premised on autosegmental representations that form the backbone of traditional non-linear analyses of harmony systems and give accounts of the primary features which reveal that Dagbanli has bi-directional harmonic spread. Based on the data, it is attested that two of the dialects deviate from the second canonical pattern(s) of [VF ...VF ...VF ...VF] which states that all vowels within a word show agreement for the harmonic feature. The paper suggests that the domain of vowel harmony in Dagbanli is the phonological word noting that [+ATR] vowels and [-ATR] vowels do not usually occur together in the same word as [+ATR] variants surface in CV words, [-ATR] vowels surface in CVC words and all non-final positions outside harmonic context where their [+ATR] variants do not occur. The paper concludes that while Tomosili dialect permits harmonic canonical pattern, Nayahili and Nanunli deviates by presenting polarity and in the harmonic domain, the mid vowels surface as [+ATR] indicating a right-to-left spread of the feature [+ATR].
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".