ABSTRACT
One of the principal motivations for pursuing this notion of locality is that it appears to provide an initial handle on the statistical gulf separating vowel harmony and consonant harmony: cross-linguistically, vowel harmony is very frequent while consonant harmony is rather limited. A nearly correct prediction of Articulatory Locality is that V -to-V contiguity, i.e. locality, should yield assimilations between the two vowels in a VCV sequence, while absence of C-to-C contiguity should yield no assimilations between the two consonants in a eve sequence. Only nearly correct, indeed, because there are clear cases of assimilation between the two consonants in a evc configuration. These cases are known as 'consonant harmony'. In Chumash, for example, the form 8apitSo-it 'I have good luck', when it appears with another suffix like -us, surfaces as [sapitso-us] 'he has good luck'. The assimilation, as described by Beeler (1970), turns the blade-alveolar fricative 8 and its corresponding affricate t8 to the tip-alveolar fricative s and affricate ts, respectively, when followed by another tip-alveolar s. Assimilation apparently occurs despite the presence of intervening vowels and consonants, and no effects are reported on these intervening sounds. Consonant harmony, then, is another apparent case of action a distance.
