The phonetics of transparency in Kaska vowel harmony

Gunnar Ólafur Hansson University of British Columbia

Patrick J. Moore

University of British Columbia 1. Introduction Several dialects of Kaska (Dene Zāgé’) exhibit a somewhat unusual and poorly understood vowel harmony pattern, by which the quality of certain vowels in prefixes, preverbs, etc., alternates depending on the quality of the stem vowel (Moore 2003). A notable aspect of this harmony is its long-distance character: the assimilation of a prefix vowel to the stem vowel takes place even when the two are separated by one or more intervening vowels which act as neutral and “transparent”, in that they allow the harmonizing property to be transmitted across them without appearing to be affected. A second property of interest is the fact that short e is only targeted by the harmony process when it is immediately followed by a h in the same syllable; otherwise short e appears to be unaffected by the harmony and is transparent to it. We report on a preliminary phonetic study, based on acoustic analysis of elicited data from one speaker of the Pelly Banks dialect. Our study aims to address three fundamental questions. First, what is the phonetic dimension in which the harmony operates; that is, on what phonetic property is the division of vowels into harmonic “classes” based, and what is the main phonetic difference between the alternating vowel qualities in prefixes? Second, what might be the phonetic motivation for treating short e in tautosyllabic eh sequences differently from e in other environments (but similarly to long ē)? Third, are the “transparent” vowels genuinely transparent, in the sense that they are truly unaffected by the harmony process, or can a phonetic (allophonic) difference be detected in harmony vs. non-harmony contexts? Answering these questions is a necessary first step towards an understanding the nature of Kaska vowel harmony, both from a synchronic perspective (its nature as an active process within the grammar of Kaska) and with respect to its diachronic emergence (its historical sources and the sequence of changes that has produced the current state of affairs). An investigation of these aspects is also necessary in order to understand the place of Kaska vowel harmony in the typology of harmony systems and long-distance interactions in the world’s languages, and what bearing the Kaska facts may have on current theoretical models of such phenomena. We conclude by pointing out some curious contradictions between, on the one hand, the synchronic workings of the vowel harmony alternations and, on the other, what can be inferred about the diachronic sources of these sound patterns. The most plausible explanation is that the observed synchronic state of affairs reflects some combination of sound change and analogical processes, though a more detailed comparative study is necessary in order to shed light on the issue. 2. Vowel harmony alternations The vowel phoneme inventory of Kaska is as depicted below, shown here both in standard Kaska orthography (1) and in reasonably broad IPA transcription (2), ignoring any contextual allophon-

ic variation within each vowel category. Note, in particular, that there is a clear phonetic dif-ference in vowel height between short e and long ē (roughly, /ɛ/ vs. /æː/), and that in terms of vowel height, short o is phonetically intermediate between long ō and ū, and considerably higher than short e (roughly, /ʊ/ vs. /ɛ/). In addition, each of these eight oral vowels has a phonemically nasalized counterpart, represented orthographically with a nasal hook (e.g. ę /æː/). For more details on Kaska phonology, as well as on other aspects of the grammar, see Moore (2002). (1) short vowels long vowels

ī ū e o ē ō a ā (2) short vowels long vowels iː uː

ɛ ʊ oː ɐ æː ɐː Several dialects of Kaska display vowel alternations in prefixes, whereby the quality of the prefix vowel is governed by that of the stem vowel (Moore 2003). This process appears to be a type of vowel harmony, though the exact nature of the assimilating feature(s) has thus far been unclear. Furthermore, a notable aspect of these harmony alternations is that the trigger and target vowels need not be in adjacent syllables. It seems that certain types of intervening vowels can be “skipped over”, allowing the harmony to propagate across these vowels without affecting their quality. In §2.1–§2.3 we provide some data illustrating the vowel harmony patterns, before reporting our phonetic findings in §3. The description here reflects the Pelly Banks dialect. 2.1 Harmony targeting long vowels Among the long vowels, the prefix vowels that alternate are ē [æː] and ā [ɐː]. Prefixes of the relevant type surface with ā [ɐː] if the upcoming stem vowel is any of a, ā, o, ō [ɐ ɐː ʊ oː], and with ē [æː] otherwise (that is, if the stem vowel is any of ī, e, ē, ū [iː ɛ æː uː]). The harmony alternation in long vowels is observed in a great many prefixes and preverbs in Kaska. Some representative examples are shown in (3)–(5). In each case, the (a) examples illustrate the ē [æː] quality while (b) shows the alternative realization with ā [ɐː] due to harmony. Note that the IPA representations in the middle column are merely broad transcriptions using the vowel symbols from (2) above; we discuss finer-grained phonetic details in §3. (3) Alternations in ē- perfective (d- or l-classifier verbs, some h-classifier verbs)

a. ējen æːdʒɛn ‘he/she sang’ (ē-d=yen) gwēdech ɡwæːdɛtʃ ‘he/she told you story’ (gu-ē-d=dech)

ēlıh æːlĩːh ‘he/she danced’ (ē-l=lıh)

ēst’ut æːstʼúːt ‘I sucked’ (ē-s-h=t’ut)

b. ākʼas ɐːkʼɐs ‘he/she ate quickly’ (ē-d=kʼas)

ādān ɐːdɐːn ‘he/she drank’ (ē-d=dān)

(4) Alternations in dē- future (< de-e- prefix sequence)

a. gedēdéł ɡɛdæːdɛɬ ‘they (pl.) will walk/go’ (ge-de-e-Ø=déł)

gégedēkēł ɡɛɡɛdæːkæːɬ ‘they (du.) will boat around’ (gé-ge-de-e-Ø=kēɬ)

dḗdēlıł dǽːdæːlíːɬ ‘he/she will do like this’ (dḗ-de-e-Ø=lıł)

dēhtsūs dæːhtsuːs ‘he/she will carry (fabric)’ (de-e-h=tsūs)

b. gedā’as ɡɛdɐːʔɐs ‘they will walk/go’ (ge-de-e-Ø=ás)

dāyāł dɐːjɐːɬ ‘he/she will walk/go’ (de-e-Ø=yāł)

gégedāʼṓł ɡɛɡɛdɐːʔóːɬ ‘they (pl.) will paddle around’ (gé-ge-de-e-Ø=ṓł)

(5) Alternations in nḗ- plural/distributive (can also be non-alternating ne-)

a. nḗgétsets nǽːɡɛtsɛts ‘they are all eating’ (nḗ#ge-d=tsets)

nḗgéhtsıh nǽːɡɛhtsĩːh ‘they are all making (things)’ (nḗ#ge-h=tsıh)

nḗgédéʼun nǽːɡɛdɛʔúːn ‘they are all shooting’ (nḗ#ge-de-Ø=un)

b. nagédān nɐːɡɛdɐːn ‘they are all drinking’ (nḗ#ge-d=dān)

nagézoy nɐːɡɛzʊj ‘they are all scraping (hide, to soften)’ (nḗ#ge-Ø=zoy)

As can be seen from the examples in (5), harmony with the stem vowel is not limited to conjunct prefixes but reaches out into the disjunct domain as well. Since the disjunct nḗ- prefix is not adjacent to the stem syllable, these examples also illustrate the long-distance application of harmony, to which we will return in §2.3 below. 2.2 Harmony targeting short vowels Superficially, the vowel harmony alternation in prefixes containing a short vowel follows a similar pattern, in that e [ɛ] alternates with a [ɐ] and the alternation is conditioned by the exact same classes of stem vowels. In other words, the prefixes in question will surface with a [ɐ] only if the upcoming stem vowel is any of a, ā, o, ō [ɐ ɐː ʊ oː], but are always realized with e [ɛ] if the stem vowel is ī, e, ē or ū [iː ɛ æː uː]. However, there is one important complication: a short e [ɛ] is only targeted by harmony if it is immediately followed by a h in the same syllable. That is, a vowel a, ā, o or ō in the stem will trigger the e → a change only in a …ehC… sequence, not in …eC(C)… sequences in which C1 is some consonant other than h. Some examples of the harmony alternations in short vowels are shown in (6)–(8) below. As several of the forms in (6) demonstrate, vowel harmony in Kaska operates in postpositional phrases no less than in the verbal complex. (6) Alternations in neh- 2nd person dual/plural object marker

a. nehyege nɛhjɛɡɛ ‘under you (du./pl.)’ (neh=yege)

nehtsʼıh nɛhtsʼĩːh ‘from you (du./pl.)’ (neh=tsʼıh)

nehyénehtīn nɛhjɛnɛhtiːn ‘he/she gave you (du./pl.) (living object)’ (neh-yé#ne-h=tīn)

b. nahghát nɐhɣát ‘away from you (du./pl.)’ (neh=ghát)

nahkāge nɐhkɐːɡɛ ‘on you (du./pl.)’ (neh=kāge)

nahyénetān nɐhjɛnɛtɐːn ‘he/she gave you (du./pl.) (long object)’ (neh-yé#ne-Ø=tān)

It is important to note that the e and the immediately following h do not need to belong to the same morpheme. Even prefixes of the shape Ce- will surface as Ca- in precisely those cases where a h- prefix follows (and the stem vowel is one of {a, ā, o, ō}), as shown in (7)–(8). The latter is typically either the h- classifier (< *ł-) or the irregular h- reflex of the s- perfective (< *s(əә)-). When not followed by h, these same prefixes surface as Ce- even if the stem vowel belongs to the relevant, harmony-triggering class. This is illustrated in (7c) and (8c).

(7) Alternations in se- conjugation marker (when followed by h- classifier) a. sehtsuts sɛhtsúːts ‘he/she put (fabric) there’ (se-h=tsuts)

b. sahtān sɐhtɐːn ‘he/she put (long object) there’ (se-h=tān) sahłaʼ sɐhɬɐʔ ‘he/she put (plural objects) there’ (se-h=łaʼ)

c. setān sɛtɐːn ‘(long object) is there’ (se-Ø=tān) sela’ sɛlɐʔ ‘(plural objects) are positioned’ (se-Ø=la’)

(8) Alternations in de- conjunct prefix (when followed by irregular h- perfective)

a. edéh’un ɛdɛhʔúːn ‘he/she shot’ (e-de-´h-Ø=un)

b. dáhyaʼ dɐhjɐʔ ‘he/she went’ (de-´h-Ø=ya’)

c. deya dɛjɐː ‘he/she is going’ (de-Ø=ya) edeʼun ɛdɛʔúːn ‘he/she is shootingʼ (e-de-Ø=un)

Particularly telling evidence that harmony is conditioned only by coda h, not by other coda con-sonants, comes from numerous doublet forms in which the perfective marker can be realized either as (irregular) h- or as (regular) s-, as shown in (9). When the stem vowel is one of {a, ā, o, ō}, harmony will affect a preceding short e only in the former case, not the latter. (9) Variability in s-perfective (h- ~ s-) and its interaction with vowel harmony

a. ejedáhya’ ejedésya’ ‘he/she went hunting’ ɛdʒɛdɐhjɐʔ ~ ɛdʒɛdɛsjɐʔ (eje#de-´h-Ø=ya’) (eje#de-´s-Ø=ya’)

b. ejegedáh’ats ejegedés’ats ‘we (pl.) went hunting’ ɛdʒɛɡɛdɐhʔɐːts ~ ɛdʒɛɡɛdɛsʔɐːts (eje#ge-de-´h-Ø=’ats) (eje#ge-de-´s-Ø=’ats)

In short, when the (potential) target vowel is short e [ɛ], vowel harmony appears to be due, in some sense, to the combined forces of a particular quality of the upcoming stem vowel and of the immediate consonantal context. We return to this issue in §3.2 and §4.1 below.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that non-alternating short a [ɐ] does occur before h in at least one prefix, directional ah-, which surfaces as such regardless of the vowel quality in the following stem (e.g. ah=degé [ɐhdɛɡɛ] ‘up ahead, uphill, upstreamʼ, ah=yegé [ɐhjɛɡɛ] ‘thereʼ, ah=tsa [ɐhtsɐː] ‘down there, downhillʼ). 2.3 Transparency of intervening (non-target) vowels As we have already seen from some of the examples in (5b) and (6b), the syllable with the alternating prefix vowel does not need to be adjacent to the stem syllable containing the vowel to which it is assimilating. This is particularly clear in cases where the affected vowel is located in the disjunct domain, separated from the stem by one or more conjunct prefixes. Specifically, vowel harmony operates across any intervening vowel of the kind that is itself immune from harmony (and does not itself constitute a trigger for harmony). In other words, there are two kinds of vowels that are transparent to vowel harmony in Kaska: the high (long) vowels ī, ū /iː uː/, and any short e /ɛ/ that is not immediately followed by a (coda) /h/. Given that Ce- is by far the most prevalent shape for prefixes in the conjunct domain in Kaska, just as in most other Athabaskan languages, the latter situation comes up quite frequently. Some examples illustrating how vowel harmony “skips over” vowels of both kinds are shown in (10). (10) Transparency of {ī, ū} and of e in non-ehC contexts

nahyénūka sı nɐhjɛnuːkɐː sı ː ‘s/he will give you (du./pl.) back (neh=yé#n-ū-Ø=ką) (contained liquid)’ mekagedīk’an mɛkɐːɡɛdiːkʼɐːn ‘they burned him/her up’ (me=kḗ#ge-de-ī-Ø=k’an) nahkénesgot nɐhkɛnɛsɡʊt ‘I’m digging you (du./pl.) out with a stick’ (neh=ké#ne-s-Ø=got)

For our present purposes, we remain agnostic as to whether some or all occurrences of e /ɛ/ in conjunct prefixes are epenthetic, such that prefixes with the shape Ce- are really C- underlyingly. Even if e is taken to be epenthetic, its transparency to vowel harmony cannot be explained by assuming that epenthetic material is “invisible” to the harmony process. As we have seen in (7)–(8), this same e is itself a legitimate target for vowel harmony whenever it happens to be followed by a tautosyllabic h. 2.4 Interim summary Returning to the vowel inventory diagrams in (1)–(2), the basic properties of the Kaska vowel harmony pattern can schematized as in (11). The solid line demarcates the class of harmony triggers (below and to the right of the line) from non-triggers. The dashed line separates the vowels that participate as targets of harmony, and hence display alternation (below the line) from those that do not. Among the short vowels, the bifurcation of the dashed line is intended to reflect the fact that whether or not short e /ɛ/ counts as a harmony target depends on its con-sonantal context: when followed by a tautosyllabic /h/ it does, otherwise not.

(11) iː uː ɛ ʊ oː

ɐ æː ɐː Finally, any vowel that is neither a harmony trigger nor a target for harmony will be transparent whenever it intervenes between a trigger-target pair. As (11) shows, this set contains ī /iː/, ū /uː/ and those tokens of e /ɛ/ that are non-targets because they are in the wrong consonantal context. One final issue merits discussion at this point. In the preceding description, it has been assumed that the e(h) ~ a(h) and ē ~ ā harmony alternations are due to the change /ɛ, æː/ → [ɐ, ɐː], a retraction process of some kind, triggered by the presence of /ʊ, oː, ɐ, ɐː/ in the stem. Is it conceivable that the reverse is true? In other words, could it be that the underlying quality of the relevant prefix vowels is in fact /ɐ, ɐː/, and that these are instead being fronted (and perhaps raised) in the complement set of environments, namely before /iː, uː, ɛ, æː/? There are several arguments suggesting that the former interpretation is the only cogent one (at least from a synchronic standpoint; see §4.2). First, the directional prefix, which is always realized as non-alternating ah- [ɐh-] (in the Pelly Banks dialect), is straightforwardly accounted for in the analysis advocated here: it simply contains /ɐ/ underlyingly. If the harmony instead were to involve a fronting process /ɐ, ɐː/ → [ɛ, æː], this morpheme would have to be treated as an idiosyncratic exception. Second, recall from the examples in (10) that when an /iː/, /uː/ or /ɛ/ intervenes between a prefix vowel and the stem vowel, it has no effect; instead, the quality of the prefix vowel is dictated entirely by the stem vowel further away. This is somewhat surprising if harmony is a matter of “fronting”; for example, the (alleged) process ɐː → æː / __ C0 iː would be seen as applying in mekēde’ıh [mɛkæːdɛʔı ːh] ‘he/she looks for it’, but not in mekānīsgoł [mɛkɐːniːsɡʊɬ] ‘he/she scratched him/her’, even though the (alleged) fronting trigger /iː/ is closer to the target in the latter case. Vowel harmony would thus need to be analyzed as a morphologically conditioned process, rather than a phonological phenomenon. By far the most conclusive argument, however, comes from those numerous conjunct prefixes that surface alternately as Ce- ~ Ca- (~ C-, in some cases), such as those shown in (7)–(8) above. Here the distribution of the alternants clearly reveals that the Ca- [Cɐ-] realization is the special case, whereas the Ce- [Cɛ-] shape must be considered the general/default form. The distribution of the latter can only be defined as a bizarre disjunction of negatives: the vowel surfaces as [ɛ] if (a) it is not immediately followed by a coda /h/ (regardless of what the stem vowel is); or if (b) the stem vowel is not one of /ɐ ɐː ʊ oː/ (regardless of whether there is a coda /h/); it is only if both of these two negatives are contradicted that the prefix vowel is [ɐ]. By contrast, the distribution of the Ca- [Cɐ-] alternant is straightforwardly expressed as a single environment (a conjunction of positives): the prefix vowel surfaces as [ɐ] if it is immediately followed by /h/ and an /ɐ ɐː ʊ oː/ follows later in the word (at any distance). For this reason, we must conclude that, as a vowel harmony process, the observed alternations are a matter of backing, /ɛ/ → [ɐ] (and, by extension, /æː/ → [ɐː] among the long vowels). 3. A preliminary phonetic study To better understand the factors at play in the observed vowel harmony alternation patterns in Kaska, we conducted an phonetic study examining the acoustic correlates of vowel height (the

first formant, F1) and vowel backness (the second formant, F2) in Kaska vowels in various phonological environments. The findings we report on here are based on elicited data (words and phrases) from one fluent female speaker of the Pelly Banks dialect. All acoustic measurements were carried out with the free Praat program (Boersma and Weenink 2011). The formant measurements were mostly automated, using the built-in scripting capabilities of Praat, with some manual checking after the fact; no doubt some errors remain. Statistics and plotting were handled in the likewise free R software environment (R Development Core Team 2011).1 3.1 The phonetics of Kaska vowel harmony The first issue of interest is the nature of the phonetic dimension(s) in which the vowel harmony alternations are taking place. What are the acoustic differences between the alternating vowel qualities? What acoustic properties set apart the class of triggers from the non-triggers? And similarly, what properties single out the class of potential target vowels? To begin to answer these questions, we measured the F1 and F2 frequency values of vowels in all stem syllables (consonantal context was not controlled for, nor was syllable structure). These are shown in Figures 1 and 2, along with 90% data ellipses for each category.2

Figure 1: Short stem vowels Figure 2: Long stem vowels A few things are immediately apparent from these plots. First, we confirm that there is a sub-stantial height (F1) difference between short e and long ē, roughly [ɛ] vs. [æː], with the latter being more comparable in height to ā. For short e, we see a surprising amount of variation in the

1 We would like to thank Barbara Meek for recording part of the corpus of data used here. Special thanks go to Jason Brown, who carried out most of the work on the digital sound files and acoustic measurements. 2 The main difference between the “short” and “long” sets is indeed duration. Looking only at closed stem syllables, the mean duration for short vowels in our data is 112 ms (SD = 32 ms) while that of long vowels is 157 ms (SD = 43 ms), a highly significant difference, t(606.03) = 14.81, p < 0.001.

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height dimension, such that many tokens of e are comparable in height to a while others are considerably higher; we will return to this point in §3.2 below. Secondly, we can see that the short vowel spelled as o is indeed intermediate in height between long ū and ō, roughly [ʊ]. Perhaps the most striking observation is that long ū turns out to be extremely centralized in Kaska; in other words, this vowel is phonetically [ʉː], not [uː]. In fact, ū in stem syllables is significantly more front (i.e. less back) than long ā, as reflected by their mean F2 values: 1560 Hz (SD = 191 Hz) for ū and 1391 Hz (SD = 158 Hz) for ā; t(144.72) = 6.91, p < 0.001. Long ū is also significantly more front than short o [ʊ] (M = 1223 Hz, SD = 173 Hz), t(138.01) = 11.11, p < 0.001. However, there is not a significant difference in F2 between long ū and short a, which is rather more centralized than its long counterpart (M = 1579 Hz, SD = 159 Hz); t(157.99) = 0.54, p = 0.59. This finding has important consequences for the characterization of the vowel harmony system. Due to the centralized/fronted quality of ū, the class of vowels that act as harmony triggers, {a, o, ā, ō}, can largely be characterized in terms of their backness alone. Furthermore, if we assume that the phonetic vowel quality distinctions among prefix vowels largely mirror those seen in stem syllables, the effect of harmony on the target vowel (ē → ā and e → a) is likewise primarily a matter of backing (with some caveats about the e → a process; see §3.2 below). In other words, it would appear plausible to classify vowel harmony in Kaska as a type of backness harmony rather than, say, a tongue-root harmony system. 3.2 The effect of postvocalic /h/ One of the more peculiar aspects of Kaska vowel harmony is the context-dependent nature of harmony onto short e. As described and illustrated in §2.2 above, a short e can only be affected by harmony (with an upcoming a, o, ā or ō vowel) if it is immediately followed by /h/. As we saw in (9), other coda consonants have no such effect. Also, mere adjacency to a coda /h/ is not enough to trigger the e → a change (cf. sehtsuts /se-h=tsuts/ → [sɛhtsʉːts] ‘he/she put (fabric) there’); rather, the presence of /h/ seems to merely facilitate the assimilatory influence of the stem vowel on the prefix vowel. What might be the nature of this “facilitatory” effect? Does a coda /h/ cause some change in the phonetic (and perhaps phonological/featural) properties of a preceding /ɛ/ that effectively pushes the latter into the class of potential harmony targets? Given the clear height difference between long ē /æː/ and short e /ɛ/, combined with the fact that the former is a target for harmony regardless of its consonantal context, the most plausible hypothesis would be that vowel harmony only targets (relatively) low vowels, and that coda /h/ has a lowering effect on the immediately preceding vowel (at least if that vowel is e /ɛ/). To investigate whether such a pre-/h/ lowering effect exists in Kaska, we examined closed stem syllables containing e, comparing Ceh and Ce’ stem syllables against other CeC stem syllables in which the final consonant is not a laryngeal.3 The results are shown in Figure 3. The two solid-line ellipses that have been superimposed on the Fig. 3 plot are 90% data ellipses for short e /ɛ/ in the contexts / __h and / __C (where C ∉ {h, ʔ}), respectively. (No 3 Needless to say, it would have been more to the point to compare (C)eh vs. other (C)eC syllables in the prefix string (where unaffected by harmony, i.e. before stems with {ī, e, ē, ū}). However, our data do not include enough tokens of the latter type for this to be feasible—not to mention the added complication that such a comparison would also have required controlling for prominence-related factors like position in the word (e.g. distance from the stem). Hence we use the phonetics of stem syllables as a proxy for what is likely at play in prefix syllables as well.

ellipse is drawn for the / __ʔ context, as there are only four data points in that set.) For com-parison, the corresponding distribution for long ē /æː/ in CēC stem syllables has been superimposed on the plot as well, indicated by a dashed-line ellipse.

Figure 3: Short e (/ɛ/) in CVC stem syllables Figure 4: Short a (/ɐ/) in CVC stem syllables As is immediately obvious from Fig. 3, the hypothesis that coda /h/ does have a lowering effect on a preceding short e /ɛ/ is supported by our data. The difference in F1 between the / __h and / __C contexts is highly significant, t(52.48) = 7.49, p < 0.001 (the F1 means are 732 Hz and 560 Hz, respectively). What is more, we see that the quality of those tokens of e /ɛ/ that are adjacent to a coda /h/ is very close to—in fact, barely distinguishable from—that of long ē /æː/. There is no significant F1 difference between short e /ɛ/ in Ceh stem syllables on the one hand and long ē /æː/ in CēC stems on the other, t(46.58) = 1.66, p = 0.10 (the F1 mean of the latter is 769 Hz). It is interesting to compare this to the situation with short a /ɐ/ in CVC stem syllables, depicted in Figure 4. Here we see that the effect of a coda laryngeal (either /h/ or /ʔ/) is minimal, as the vowel is already quite low. Indeed, the difference in F1 between the / __h context and the / __C context (where C is not laryngeal) does not reach significance, t(36.82) = 1.88, p = 0.07, though it is certainly suggestive. The same remains true even if the two pre-laryngeal contexts are pooled, such that / __{h,ʔ} is compared against the / __C context, t(94.91) = 1.94, p = 0.06. Finally, it is also interesting to note that coda /h/ does not seem to have any detectable lowering effect on a preceding long stem vowel. For example, the mean F1 values for /iː/ in / __{h,ʔ} vs. in other / __C contexts are indistinguishable (both are 385 Hz), and no lowering effect is seen in /ʉː/ or /oː/ either (as for /æː/, no stems ending in /æːh/ or /æːʔ/ occur in our data). 3.3 Are the “transparent” vowels really transparent? The final question we are interested in concerns the so-called “transparent” vowels: seemingly unaffected prefix vowels that intervene between an earlier prefix or preverb that is being targeted

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by harmony and the (back) stem vowel that is triggering the harmony. As we saw in §2.3, any vowel that is not itself a legitimate harmony target will act as transparent—that is, will be “skipped over”—in such situations. This includes the two (long) high vowels ī, ū /iː ʉː/ and any short e /ɛ/ that is either in an open syllable or followed by some coda consonant other than /h/. The status of (allegedly) transparent segments in (seemingly) long-distance assimilations such as these has been a topic of considerable debate among phonologists in recent years. Several reported cases of transparent vowels in vowel harmony systems have been called into question, and phonetic (acoustic and/or articulatory) data adduced as evidence that the inter-vening vowels are in fact affected by the spreading feature or articulatory gesture (e.g. Gick et al. 2006, Benus and Gafos 2007). At the same time, other cases exist which speak unequivocally for the existence of genuinely transparent segments; this is especially true for long-distance consonant assimilations (consonant harmony; see Rose and Walker 2004, Hansson 2010a). This is a rather murky area, but the implications for linguistic theory are quite significant, as they bear on the notion of locality and the nature representations and relations in phonology. For example, it has been proposed that all feature-spreading interactions observe Strict Locality (in effect, “no skipping”; Gafos 1999, Ní Chiosáin and Padgett 2001). As a result, any genuine cases of long-distance interaction (true “skipping”) must either involve some mechanism other than spreading (such as featural agreement; Walker 2000, Pulleyblank 2003, Rose and Walker 2004, Hansson 2010a, 2010b; cf. Mailhot and Reiss 2007) or else suggest that the Strict Locality hypothesis is simply false. Another line of thought is that locality in segment-to-segment interactions—be they by spreading or agreement—is relativized, such that for any given case, the (possibly empty) class of transparent segments is defined partly by stipulation and partly derived from general principles of contrast and/or markedness (Vaux 1999, Nevins 2005, 2010). For this reason, it is important to examine the details of each reported case of long-distance interaction, not only with respect to the phonological patterns as such but also at a finer level of phonetic detail. In the case of Kaska, an important question we need to ask is whether the (acoustic) phonetic evidence suggests that the seemingly “transparent” intervening vowels are genuinely being skipped over by the property that is being transmitted from trigger vowel to target vowel. Or do the acoustics of these intervening /iː/, /ʉː/ or /ɛ/ vowels suggest that in fact, they too are undergoing some (allophonic) backing in the process? This is not a straightforward question to answer, as the relevant data can be difficult to come by. The crucial comparisons are between pairs of forms that contain sequences like …ē…ī…ē… (no harmony) vs. …ā…ī…ā… (harmony), or …eh…e…ū… (no harmony) vs. …ah…e…ō… (harmony), ideally while keeping constant as many other, potentially confounding factors as possible.4 Our current corpus of data does not allow us to control systematically for such factors as the identity of the triggering vowel, identity of the target vowel, number of syllables in the word, number of intervening (transparent) vowels between trigger and target, distance (in syllables) of the transparent vowel from the trigger or the target vowel, or the like. Instead, we have tried to restrict ourselves to those types of contexts for which we have enough 4 It would also be worth comparing contexts like …ā…ī…ā… (long-distance harmony) to ones like …ū…ī…ā…, …e…ī…ā… or …ī…ā…, where there is no harmony target at all on the other side of the transparent vowel. It is conceivable that the transparent vowels are indeed affected by the spreading property, but only when “en route” to a (genuine) target ē or eh earlier in the word (for discussion of cases of this type, see Hansson 2010b). We have not explored this issue systematically with respect to our current data, but hope to address it in future work.

data points (sometimes just barely) to allow a reasonably conclusive comparison. For example, in the cases of both ī /iː/ and e /ɛ/, we only look at forms in which that vowel is located in the syllable immediately preceding the stem, which in most cases is the penultimate syllable. We do not at present have enough data to examine the phonetics of intervening ū /ʉː/ in harmony vs. non-harmony contexts, and that topic must be left to future research. Our results for intervening, and hence potentially transparent, cases of ī /iː/ and e /ɛ/ are shown in Figures 5 and 6. Looking first at ī, Figure 5 displays the results for words of three or more syllables in which an ī occurs in the penultimate syllable. The stem vowel (potentially a harmony trigger) is in the final syllable, and the antepenultimate syllable contains some vowel that may either be a potential harmony target (ē ~ ā, depending on the stem vowel) or another “neutral” (non-target) vowel, which in the relevant subset of our data is always either another ī or a short e. As the plot suggests, there is almost complete overlap between the phonetic realizations of ī in the harmony and non-harmony contexts. In the backness (F2) dimension, the mean values for the two distributions (2383 Hz vs. 2393 Hz) are indistinguishable, t(20.69) = 0.10, p = 0.92. Our data thus suggest that when embedded in a vowel harmony context, intervening between a syllable containing a harmony target and the stem syllable containing a harmony trigger, the vowel ī /iː/ is genuinely transparent in Kaska.

Figure 5: Intervening ī /iː/ (pre-stem syll.) Figure 6: Intervening e /ɛ/ (pre-stem syll.) For short e /ɛ/, the number of data points in the harmony context is quite small, due to the re-striction to cases where the harmony trigger and target vowels are in the immediately adjacent syllables to either side of the syllable containing the e vowel. Despite this limitation, there is a clear and significant difference in F2 values between the harmony tokens (M = 1744 Hz, SD =

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120 Hz) and the non-harmony tokens (M = 2159 Hz, SD = 124 Hz), t(43) = 8.16, p < 0.001.5 It thus seems that short e /ɛ/ is perhaps not fully transparent to backness harmony in Kaska. While its typical realization in pre-stem syllables appears to be somewhere in the [e]–[ɪ] range (judging from the non-harmony tokens in Fig. 6), it is realized with a more retracted, [əә]-like quality in those cases where it intervenes between two back-vowel syllables. Our tentative conclusion is, then, that while long ī /iː/ is a truly transparent vowel in the Kaska harmony system, short e /ɛ/ may not be. However, firm conclusions cannot yet be drawn on this point. For one thing, the data are quite limited, and often include more than one recorded token of the same word or phrase. This can introduce spurious biases that accidentally skew the distributions in some random direction. Secondly, we do not know that the backing effect on e observed in Fig. 6 is a phonological effect—a direct reflection of vowel harmony as such (in the sense that the e is harmonizing with the following stem vowel). We cannot rule out that what we are seeing is instead merely a phonetic effect of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation: that the back-front-back transition across the three syllables causes the tongue body to significantly undershoot its articulatory target in the middle syllable (the one containing the front vowel e).6 Furthermore, if we interpret the effect seen in Fig. 6 as coarticulation, we can explain the absence of any analogous effect on ī in Fig. 5 in terms of coarticulatory resistance. It is well known from many other languages (including English) that /i/ is generally far more resistant to coarticulatory influence from nearby segments than are other vowels (Recasens and Espinosa 2009). The fact that ī /iː/ has much longer duration than short e /ɛ/ would also contribute to the latter being more susceptible to coarticulation and undershoot. (The mean duration of the har-mony tokens of ī in Fig. 5 is 132 ms, that of the analogous tokens of e in Fig. 6 a mere 66 ms.) In summary, our findings with regard to the phonetic (non-)transparency of intervening neutral vowels in Kaska vowel harmony are intriguing, if not entirely conclusive. They certainly suggest that further, more controlled and systematic investigation is warranted. In particular, it is important to test how the high rounded vowel ū /ʉː/ behaves in this regard. 4. The interaction of postvocalic /h/ and vowel harmony We now return to our findings from §3.2 regarding the phonetic effects of coda /h/ on a pre-ceding vowel, and the implications that these findings have for our understanding of the work-ings of vowel harmony in Kaska. In particular, the e ~ a harmony alternation that is observed in / __hC contexts can be seen as resulting from the interplay of the coda-/h/ effects and a vowel-to-vowel assimilation (i.e. harmony) effect. Below we sketch a conjectural “just-so” story along these lines (§4.1). As it turns out, however, what little is known about the diachronic background of the Kaska vowel system is not completely consistent with that picture. We propose that the current synchronic state of affairs most likely reflects the end product of a sequence of historical changes: a phonetically motivated sound change followed by analogical restructuring/reanalysis and extension (§4.2). 5 We could double the number of tokens of e in the harmony context by including forms in which the harmony target is one syllable further away from the (pre-stem) syllable containing the e in question. This substantially increases the amount of variation, but the effect on F2 remains highly significant, although its magnitude decreases somewhat. 6 The same critique can be leveled at Benus and Gafos’ (2007) analogous findings about “transparent” vowels in Hungarian backness harmony. For discussion of the delicate conceptual distinction between harmony/assimilation and coarticulation, and the relationship between the two, see Przezdziecki (2005).

4.1 A conjectural (synchronic) explanation As reported in §3.2 above, we observed that an immediately following coda /h/ causes a strong (allophonic) effect of lowering in short e /ɛ/, at least in stem syllables. In light of these findings, it does seem reasonable to conclude that it is precisely this lowering effect that coda /h/ has on a preceding /ɛ/ that causes the latter to fall into the class of legitimate harmony targets—hence producing the context-sensitive character of the [ɛ] ~ [ɐ] (e ~ a) harmony alternation, in contrast to the [æː] ~ [ɐː] (ē ~ ā) alternation which shows no such context-sensitivity. In other words, in an /…ɛhC…/ sequence, the (typical) realization of e /ɛ/ is something resembling a low [æ], and hence qualitatively similar to the harmony undergoer ē /æː/. It thus appears that e /ɛ/ has (at least) two allophones, conditioned by the following consonantal context; the lower allophone [æ] is subject to backness harmony with an upcoming back vowel [ʊ, oː, ɐ, ɐ], while the default [ɛ] allophone is not. Recall also from §3.3 that we did detect a small but significant effect of backing due to a back stem vowel /ʊ, oː, ɐ, ɐ/ on a preceding short /ɛ/ even when that /ɛ/ is not followed by a coda /h/, such as in examples like tsādesdlṓh [tsɐːdɛsdlóːh] ‘I am laughing’. This suggests that the /ɛ/ → [ɐ] change that occurs under vowel harmony in / __h contexts can be, in a sense, decomposed into two distinct but interacting forces, as schematized in (12). (12) Allophonic/phonetic effects contributing to e /ɛ/ → a [ɐ] under harmony:

a. lowering (variable/gradient), caused by following tautosyllabic [h]; and b. backing (variable/gradient), caused by a back vowel in a following syllable.

Even though both of these effects are generally allophonic, and likely phonetic (coarticulatory) in nature rather than phonological (operations on features), it appears that their combination is leading to a categorical, neutralizing change. The surface realization of /ɛ/ in those environments that satisfy both (12a) and (12b) becomes indistinguishable from that of underlying /ɐ/. Figures 7 and 8 are an attempt at visualizing this interpretation of the state of affairs. The filled points in Figure 7 represent the mean F1/F2 values of short e /ɛ/ and short a /ɐ/ in closed (CVC) syllables immediately preceding the stem, divided into the following four environments: (13) Categories of environments for short e /ɛ/ (and a /ɐ/) in a pre-stem closed syllable:

Followed by coda /h/? (context for lowering)

Followed by back vowel? (context for harmony)

ɛC.CE(C) no no ɛh.CE(C) yes no ɛC.CA(C) no yes ɐh.CA(C) yes yes

Of course, when both contexts are met, we find a /ɐ/ rather than e /ɛ/, as vowel harmony applies to a short vowel in precisely this conjunction of environments.

Figure 7: Phonetic effects on short e /ɛ/ (in pre-stem syllable)

Figure 8: Harmony as combination of allophonic effects

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In Figure 8, the different forces at play have been given explicit labels: on the one hand, the (coarticulatory) retraction caused by a following back stem vowel, and on the other, the lowering caused by a following coda /h/. The unfilled square is intended to represent something like the (predicted) combination or sum of these two effects. The suggestion, then, is that this combina-tion of allophonic effects pushes the phonetic realization of /ɛ/ very close to the pre-existing phonemic category of /ɐ/, close enough to cause such retracted-and-lowered instances of /ɛ/ to be recategorized as [ɐ] (identical to underlying /ɐ/). The outcome is a pattern in which short /ɛ/ is subject to backness harmony with an upcoming /ʊ oː ɐ ɐː/, but where this harmony only takes effect when the target /ɛ/ is immediately followed by an /h/ in the same syllable. 4.2 Synchrony vs. diachrony: disentangling the evidence The scenario outlined in Figure 8 would appear to be a plausible explanation for how this sound pattern came into being, historically speaking, and might well have some validity as a synchronic account as well (that is, reflecting the forces at play within the phonological grammar of Kaska). With respect to the diachronic dimension, however, what little relevant comparative-historical evidence there is suggests that a rather more complex scenario underlies the full range of facts. The above account presupposes that the short vowel that now alternates between a [ɐ] and e [ɛ] (or, rather, [æ]) goes back to a previously non-alternating e, and that the a alternant found in the “__hCA(C)” environment in (13) is an innovation, the result of a phonetically motivated sound change that operated in that specific context. The usual historical source of short e in Kaska is Proto-Athabaskan *əә. In the Pelly Banks dialect, *əә generally yielded e, though an a reflex is also found in a few specific consonantal contexts (Moore 2002). Many of the prefixes that display the e ~ a harmony alternation do indeed go back to a *əә vocalism; this is certainly true of most (if not all) of the relevant conjunct prefixes that have the shape (C)e- ~ (C)a- (where the *əә may or may not be epenthetic), such as in (7)–(9) above. However, for some of the prefixes the original vowel appears instead to have been *a, the general reflex of which is a in Kaska. For example, it is our understanding that the 2nd person dual/plural agreement prefixes are reconstructed as *aχ- (subject) and *naχ- (object), certainly not as *əәχ- and *nəәχ-. This suggests that in some prefixes, the source of the e ~ a alternation may have been some kind of fronting process (a > e) before {ī, e, ē, ū}, rather than backing before {a, ā, o, ō}. What makes the picture even more complicated is the fact that in other dialects of Kaska, *əә generally yields a rather than e (cf. Liard łat vs. Pelly Banks łet ‘smoke’ < PA *łəәd) and in spite of this, vowel harmony alternations (e ~ a) can be found even in (some of) these varieties. As for the long-vowel ē ~ ā alternation, while it is possible that some of the mor-phemes in question might go back to an *ā vocalism, many of the alternating vowels reflect contracted e + e sequences (*əә + əә), as we saw in (4) above. With respect to the short-vowel e ~ a alternations, it would seem a highly implausible co-incidence if Kaska were to have undergone two separate historical sound changes which had opposite effects and which operated in complementary environments: e > a when simultaneously followed (immediately) by h and (at some distance) by a back vowel, and also a > e in all en-vironments except when simultaneously followed by h and a back vowel.7 Instead, it seems far

7 Note that the first three rows in table (13) cannot reasonably be collapsed into a single phonological environment; they must be interpreted as the “elsewhere” counterpart to the environment in which the a /ɐ/ alternant is found. In

more likely that only one of these two historical processes occurred as a (phonetically driven) sound change, and that the other reflects a subsequent analogical process (reanalysis, restructur-ing, rule inversion, extension, or the like). But if so, which is which? Here we do not have much to go on, but there is one observation that could be taken as suggestive evidence, namely the fact that in those prefixes with e ~ a that seem to reflect original a (*a) rather than e (*əә), the conditioning h is part of the same morpheme. In other words, the coda h is always present, and the alternation (e.g. 2.du/pl.obj. neh- ~ nah-) is thus controlled by a single factor: the backness of the stem vowel. By contrast, the conditioning of the alternating shapes in (C)e- ~ (C)a- prefixes (e.g. se- ~ sa- in (7) above) is considerably more complex, as it depends on two separate and independent factors: the presence vs. absence of a following h (a h- classifier or perfective prefix) and the backness of the stem vowel. If one of these two prefix classes “acquired” its e ~ a alternations secondarily, modelled after the other prefix class (where that same alternation was already in place, reflecting an earlier sound change), it seems more likely that it is the (C)eh- ~ (C)ah- prefixes that were the “innovators”. In other words, that these were consistently (C)ah- at an earlier stage, and that the e ~ a alternation was extended to these prefixes by analogy with the (C)e- ~ (C)a- prefixes. A second argument in favour of this account would be the complete lack of alternation in one (C)ah- morpheme, namely the directional ah- prefix mentioned at the end of §2.2 above. In analogical change, it is not surprising to see individual items remaining unaffected, whereas this would be less expected if a phonetically driven sound change were involved. One way of envisaging this analogical process is as the restructuring of underlying forms, along the following lines, taking 2.du/pl.obj. neh-/nah- as an example. Non-alternating [nɐh-] (= /nɐh-/) was reinterpreted as being the surface realization of underlying /nɛh-/ under back harmony—just like [Cɐ-h-] is always the back-harmony reflection of an underlying /Cɛ-h-/ prefix sequence. In forms where the stem actually contains a back vowel, this reinterpretation was covert; that is, we can assume that the reinterpretation originated in precisely such situations of structural ambiguity. The overt consequence was that with front-vowel stems, the new shape [nɛh-] (or, in somewhat narrower phonetic transcription, [næh-]) came to be used in place of the original [nɐh-]. If this analysis of the historical sequence of events is more or less along the right lines, we can conclude that the original sound change that gave rise to the observed alternations in short-vowel prefixes was e > a—that is, ɛ > ɐ—much as described in §4.1. The lowering aspect of the ɛ > ɐ change (roughly, ɛ > æ) was then due to a following tautosyllabic [h], and the backing aspect (which affected short and long vowels alike, {æ, æː} > {ɐ, ɐː}) was a matter of vowel-to-vowel assimilation: the vowel harmony as such. However, we should emphasize that this is a very tentative conclusion. In particular, given the intriguing differences between dialects in terms of the reflexes of *əә and the presence vs. absence of vowel harmony alternations (and possibly some differences in the patterning of those alternations), it is especially important to undertake a more systematic comparative study of Kaska vowel phonology across different dialects. We hope to be able to address this need in future work. spite of this, one can imagine formulating the above a > e change as a sound change: a context-free change that is being blocked in just those situations where the a is followed both by a coda h and a back vowel in the upcoming stem syllable. That is, the lowering and backing effects discussed in §4.1 could conceivably be seen as inhibitory rather than triggering factors.

5. Summary and conclusions In this paper, we have reported the main findings of a preliminary acoustic-phonetic study of the vowels of Kaska (the Pelly Banks dialect), in particular as regards its somewhat unusual vowel harmony system. With respect to the partitioning of (stem) vowels into the classes of harmony triggers {a, ā, o, ō} vs. non-triggers {ī, e, ē, ū}, we found that Kaska ū has a very fronted, centralized quality—more front even than ā—which we can transcribe as [ʉː]. As a result, the class of harmony triggers can be defined largely in terms of the front–back dimension. Similarly, a second finding of our study allows us to characterize the vowel quality alternations in harmony targets, e ~ a and ē ~ ā, as likewise being a matter of front vs. (relatively) back. This is fairly obvious for the long vowels, where ē = [æː], such that the ē ~ ā alternation is in fact [æː] ~ [ɐː]. What we discovered was that before a coda /h/, the only environ-ment in which short e can be subject to harmony, its phonetic realization is quite low, much closer to [æ] than to its normal, [ɛ]-like quality. As a result, even the short-vowel harmony alternation e ~ a can be said to be one of [æ] ~ [ɐ]. The fact that Kaska vowel harmony thus seems to be conditioned by an allophonic (non-contrastive) property—the lowered realization of /ɛ/ before coda /h/—has implications for phonological theory, given that contrast is often claimed to play a fundamental role in shaping the range of possible harmony processes (Hall 2007, Nevins 2010). While it seems reasonable on these grounds to describe vowel harmony in Kaska as a case of backness harmony, it should be emphasized that other dimensions might well be impli-cated as well, such as tongue-root position (a feature like [Advanced Tongue Root] or [Retracted Tongue Root]). For example, in most varieties of Sekani and Beaver, /u/ patterns with /i e/ (as against /ʊ əә o a/) in triggering palatalization of /d t t’/ to [dʒ tʃ tʃ’] (Sharon Hargus, personal communication). This process most likely involves some property like [ATR]; the connection between [ATR] and frontness in vowels is well known (Archangeli and Pulleyblank 1994, Vaux 1996), and [ATR] vowels are found to trigger palatalization/fronting in consonants in certain other languages (Ribeiro 2000, Ćavar 2007). The possible involvement of tongue-root gestures in the vowel contrasts and vowel harmony patterns of Kaska is a topic we would like to explore in future work, perhaps using instrumental methods like ultrasound imaging (Gick 2002). The third finding concerns the status of the long high vowels ī, ū and the short vowel e (when not followed by coda /h/) as “transparent” segments in the harmony system. When any of these vowels intervenes between a back-vowel trigger (in the stem syllable) and a potential target vowel (in an earlier prefix or preverb) it appears, impressionistically, to be skipped over and unaffected by the harmony. This is a particularly important issue, given the long-standing con-troversy and debate in the theoretical literature regarding the locality of phonological inter-actions, and whether truly long-distance assimilation exists or if “transparent” segments are instead permeated by the spreading property. Here, interestingly enough, our results point in opposite directions for ī and e (we did not have enough data on ū). When back harmony applies across an intervening ī /iː/, that vowel does seem to be genuinely transparent; we find absolutely no hint of any backing (or lowering) effect of the harmony. By contrast, when e /ɛ/ occurs in the same environment, we see a clear backing effect resulting in a [əә]-like realization, suggesting that the supposedly transparent vowel is in fact being affected by the backness property that is being transmitted across it. However, we cannot at this point rule out an explanation in terms of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation (phonetics) rather than feature-based assimilation (phonology).

Further study is needed, in which a wider range of environments would be examined, con-founding factors controlled for in a more systematic way, and the phonetics of intervening ū in-vestigated as well. With respect to the interplay between vowel harmony and the lowering effect of coda /h/, we outlined a conjectural explanation by which the combined consequence of two allophonic (perhaps coarticulatory) effects—lowering and backing—is that the realization of /ɛ/ comes close enough to [ɐ] (= /ɐ/) in order to be recategorized as such. As a result, a pattern emerges whereby /ɛ/ → [ɐ] by vowel harmony only when a coda /h/ immediately follows. While this would seem to be a plausible diachronic explanation for how this sound pattern came into being, we pointed out that the relevant comparative-historical facts seem to suggest a more complex story. Some of the instances of alternating e ~ a seem to go back to *a (> Kaska a), rather than to *əә (which in Pelly Banks generally yielded e) as would have been expected. However, in many other cases the e ~ a vowel is indeed a reflex of *əә. The situation is complicated further by the fact that there are other dialects where the general historical development was *əә > a rather than *əә > e, but where vowel harmony alternations are nevertheless also observed. Our main conclusion on this front is that a great deal of further investigation is needed. In particular, it is necessary to undertake a more systematic cross-dialectal comparison of the vowel harmony patterns and of the distribu-tion of short e and a in general. This, in combination with careful consideration of current Proto-Athabaskan reconstructions for the morphemes in question, is likely to yield a better under-standing of how Kaska came to exhibit such an unusual vowel harmony system. References Archangeli, Diana, and Douglas Pulleyblank. 1994. Grounded phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT

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Ćavar, Małgorzata E. 2007. [ATR] in Polish. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 15: 207–228. Gafos, Adamantios I. 1999. The articulatory basis of locality in phonology. New York: Garland. Gick, Bryan. 2002. The use of ultrasound for linguistic phonetic fieldwork. Journal of the

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Nevins, Andrew. 2005. Microvariations in harmony and value-relativized parametrization. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 5: 119–164.

Nevins, Andrew. 2010. Locality in vowel harmony. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ní Chiosáin, Máire, and Jaye Padgett. 2001. Markedness, segment realization, and locality in

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