Yoruba Vowels Agree To Align By Correspondence

AGREEment and ALIGNment approaches have been deployed in mutual exclusivity to evaluate total, opaque and transparent vowel harmony patterns in language, with problems arguably associated with each approach. The AGREEment approach accounts for total and opaque harmonies but not transparent harmony, and it does not reference for directionality or feature spreading. The ALIGNment approach takes care of the intractable transparent harmony in addition to accounting for total but not opaque harmonies. It also portends an unwieldy treatment of directionality which evokes different constraints for left and right edge alignment. Hence, for apparent incomprehensive evaluation of all kinds of harmony, scholars have either abandoned both approaches or have modified AGREEment as Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) and Alignment as Spread; again deploying them exclusively, such that the problem of directionality persists. Thus, there has yet been explored the combined conspiracy of AGREEment/ABC and ALIGNment/Spread approaches. This paper synthesises the two broad approaches as the “AGREE to ALIGN Approach” and applies it to ATR harmony in Akure (Total), Ife (Transparent) and Oyo (Opaque) dialects of Yoruba. Consequently, by the auspicious permutation of the hierarchy of the same set of combination of AGREEment and ALIGNment constraints with emphasis on stem control, a comprehensive account is provided for the transparent and opaque effects of non-participating vowels.