Vowel harmony in Romance languages

This chapter presents the main features of vowel harmony (VH) patterns in Romance. Virtually all Romance harmonies are unidirectional—that is, they are right-to-left or left-to-right processes. Furthermore, in most Romance vowel harmonies the stress-bearing vowel is either the target (most usually assimilating to the 􀁿nal vowel, a process known as ‘metaphony’ in Romance linguistics) or the trigger; even when this is not the case, the boundaries of the process are prosodically de􀁿ned. In some VH processes, there can be intervening transparent vowels between the target and the trigger. Most harmonies displayed by Romance varieties involve vowel height, though there are some instances of rounding or backness assimilation in Swiss Lombard, Valencian Catalan, and Romanian, as well as cases of centralization (or laxing) in Canadian French, Cantabrian, and central Sicilian, and complete vowel copy in Italo-Romance.