The Interaction of Palatal Coarticulation and Palatal Harmony in Kazan Tatar

Vowel harmony and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation are long-distance assimilatory processes wherein certain vowels trigger systematic changes in adjacent vowels; harmony effects phonological change, resulting in phonemic alternation, while coarticulation effects phonetic change. This study examines the coarticulatory processes present in disharmonic words in Kazan Tatar, a language with left-to-right palatal harmony. While right-to-left palatal coarticulation is found to be widespread, left- to-right palatal coarticulation is virtually nonexistent in Tatar. It is hypothesized that gradient and categorical processes sharing the same triggers, targets, target feature, and direction cannot coexist; the diachronic implication for Tatar is that, once coarticulation was phonologized into harmony the original coarticulatory process that gave rise to harmony was eradicated. This two-way interaction between gradient and categorical processes argues in favor of the distinctly phonological nature of vowel harmony and against a phonetic account of harmony.