Download or read book Positional Faithfulness written by Jill N. Beckman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1999. This study developed from a dissertation in 1993, when the author undertook what she thought would be a simple Optimality Theory analysis of Shona vowel harmony. Having initially treated Shona height harmony as a case of featural alignment, akin to Kirchner's 1993 analysis of Turkish she realized that alignment constraints alone could not account for one central aspect of the Shona case: the priority of initial syllable features in determining the outcome of harmony. This volume of research outlines the authirs discoveries.