De la coarticulación a la armonía vocálica en valenciano

It is claimed that vowel harmony generally issues from phonologization of previous coarticulation effects among adjacent vowels. The aim of this paper is to describe two Northern Valencian varieties which seem to respond to the two stages in the consolidation of vowel harmony. On the one hand, the variety of Nules, which displays high degrees of coarticulation between a stressed mid-open rounded vowel /ɔ/ and a posttonic low vowel, but only shows total leveling of features in an especially asymmetric context, i.e. when the low vowel appears in post-tonic internal position. On the other hand, the variety of Borriana, where a low vowel totally assimilates to a preceding stressed mid-open rounded vowel /ɔ/, except if they are separated by a morphological word-boundary; across words, strong coarticulatory effects, similar to those found in Nules, are attested.