Emergence and decline of vowel harmony
Phonological patterns evolve and decay in interesting ways, and there has been relatively little work on the diachronic pathways by which vowel harmony emerges and declines. In this line of work I examine the history of vowel harmony, particularly in the Turkic languages, to explore the ways that synchronic structure helps make sense of historical changes in these patterns.
McCollum, Adam. in press. On how and why vowel harmony decays. In The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony, Harry van der Hulst and Nancy Ritter, eds. Oxford University Press [pdf]
Kavitskaya, Darya and Adam McCollum. 2023. The rise and fall of rounding harmony in Turkic. In Darya Kavitskaya and Alan C.L. Yu (eds.), The Life Cycle of Language: Past, Present, and Future. Clarendon Press, pp. 23-33. [pdf]
Kavitskaya, Darya and Adam McCollum. 2022. The development of vowel harmony in Turkic: Phonologization and analogy. The 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oxford University. [pdf]
Kavitskaya, Darya and Adam McCollum. More than phonologization: The emergence and decay of vowel harmony in Turkic. OCP 19: Understanding sound change workshop. University of Deusto, Donostia, Spain, January 27. [slides]
McCollum, Adam. 2016. Modeling the Gradient Evolution and Decay of Harmony Systems. In The Supplemental Proceedings of the Annual Meeting on Phonology, University of British Columbia/Simon Fraser University. [pdf]
McCollum, Adam. 2015. Labial Harmonic Shift in Kazakh: Mapping the Pathways and Motivations for Decay. In The Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, University of California, Berkeley, pp. 329-352. [pdf]