Persian Vowel Harmony Without Exceptionality: A Reply to Jam [Review of the Article Vowel Harmony in Persian, by B. Jam, 2020]

Document Type : Book Review

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of English Language, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Lorestan University, Khorramabad, Lorestan, Iran

Abstract

Jam (2020) attempts to provide an Optimality-Theoretic analysis of Persian vowel harmony. As to cases where backness harmony does not appear to occur, his explanation appeals to Lexically Specific Constraint Theory, treating these instances as exceptional rather than systematic. In this reply, I argue that such an appeal to exceptionality is unnecessary, and I propose an alternative analysis in which regressive vowel harmony in Persian can be accounted for in a principled, unified manner without recourse to lexically indexed constraints. By introducing an appropriately formulated markedness constraint, it becomes possible to capture the full range of observed patterns while maintaining the parsimony and explanatory elegance expected of an Optimality-Theoretic framework. In addition to this central point, I identify several further weaknesses in Jam’s analysis. These include a conflation of rule ordering with constraint ranking, which obscures the theoretical distinction between derivational and constraint-based approaches, the problematic assumption that the phonological representation of loanwords should mirror their source-language forms, and the omission of critical information in both the representations and tableaux.

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References

Hansson, G. O. (2001). Theoretical and typological issues in consonant harmony [Doctoral dissertation, University of California Berkeley]. eScholarship. https://escholarship.org /uc/item/9q7949gn
Hassandoust, M. (2015). The etymological dictionary of Persian (5 Vols.). Academy of Persian Language and Literature. [In Persian]
Jam, B. (2020). Vowel harmony in Persian. Lingua: An International Review of General Linguistics, 246, Article 102905. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102905
Sadeghi, A. (2001). Masaele Tarikhi-ye Zaban-e Farsi [Historical issues of Persian]. Sokhan. [In Persian]
Sloos, M. (2013). Phonological grammar and frequency: An integrated approach: Evidence from German, Indonesian and Japanese [Doctoral dissertation, University of Groningen]. University of Groningen Research Portal. https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/phonological-grammar-and-frequency-an-integrated-approach
Tabibzadeh, O. (2021). A strange and repetitive mistake in phonological descriptions of Iranian dialects. Language and Linguistics, 17(34), 333–340. https://doi.org/10.30465/lsi.2022.8445.
Research in Western Iranian Languages and Dialects
Volume 13, Issue 3
September 2025
Pages 103-108

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