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Assimilation
E Zsiga, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Definition
Assimilation is a phonological process in which two sounds that are different become more alike. (The opposite of assimilation is dissimilation, in which sounds that are alike become different.) Assimilation may be either local, in which the two sounds must be immediately adjacent, or long distance, where one sound affects another even though other segments intervene. Local assimilation is the most common type of phonological process, and it can occur along just about any phonetic dimension, including place, voicing, nasality, continuancy, rounding, and palatalization. Assimilations may be partial or total. In partial assimilation, one segment comes to match another in one or more, but not all, phonological features. In total assimilation, two segments become identical. Both partial and total assimilation can be illustrated with the English negative prefix in-. The basic form of the prefix is [in-], as in inaccurate and insecure. In impossible, the [n] undergoes partial assimilation, changing to match the place of articulation of the following stop, but maintaining its

underlying nasality. In illiterate, the assimilation is total, with the [n] becoming identical to the adjacent [1]. Assimilations may also be distinguished by the direction in which the change occurs. In a sequence AB, if A changes to become more like B, as in [np] becomes [mp], the assimilation is termed regressive (as though B were reaching back to change A) or anticipatory (A anticipates a feature of B). If B changes to become more like A, the assimilation is termed progressive (A reaches forward to affect B) or perseverative (some feature of A perseveres into B). An example of progressive assimilation is found in the English past tense and plural suffixes, which are basically voiced (as in rowed [ro-d] and toes [to-z]), but become voiceless when preceded by a voiceless segment (as in cats [kt-s] and talked [tak-t]). Assimilation is sensitive to syllabic position and to prominence. For example, segments in the syllable coda assimilate to segments in the onset far more often than reverse (Ito , 1988; Beckman, 1998). Position in the word also plays a role: medial vowels assimilate to initial vowels, and affixes assimilate to roots. Steriade (2001) defines prominence in terms of perceptual salience, arguing that segments assimilate

554 Assimilation

in contexts where contrastive features can not be clearly heard: postvocalic consonants generally assimilate to prevocalic consonants, because release into a vowel provides the most salient cues to the phonological features of a consonant.

Examples
Local Assimilation, Partial

One of the most common assimilations crosslinguistically is nasal consonants assimilating in place of articulation to a following stop. Examples include English inaccurate vs. impossible and compact vs. contact vs. co[N]gress. In Twi, the negative prefix is also a nasal: [me-m-pE] I do not like, [me-n-tO] I do not buy, [me-0-0a] I do not receive, [me-N-ka] I do not say. For Catalan (CatalanValencian-Balear), Kiparsky (1985) reported nasal assimilation to seven different places of articulation:
(1) so[n] amics so[m] pocs so[M] felicos so[n 9 ] [d 9 ]os so[0] rics so[J] [y]iures so[N] grans they are friends they are few they are happy they are two they are rich they are free they are big

consonants: [kokusai] international, [kitai] expecta tion (Tsuchida, 1996). In Ancient Greek, obstruent clusters assimilated in both voicing and aspiration (Smyth, 1920): [graph-o] I write, but [gEgrap-tai] has been written and [grab-den] writing/scraping; [trib-o] I rub, but [tetrip-tai] has been rubbed and [etriph-the:n] it was rubbed. Vowels and consonants sometimes influence one another. In many languages, coronal consonants become alveopalatals before high front vowels or glides, assimilating the higher tongue position. English has alternations such as grade/gradual ([d]/[dZ]), habit/ habitual ([t]/[ts]), press/pressure ([s]/[s]). A vowel may also impose palatalization as a secondary articulation on a consonant, adding an additional high front tongue position without changing the consonants primary place: Russian [Zen-a] wife, [Zenj-i-tj] marry. The change of a stop to a fricative between vowels, as in Spanish [bola] ball, [la bola] the ball, is sometimes considered assimilation of the feature [continuant]. Assimilation of [-continuant] may be seen in postnasal hardening: Kikuyu [bur-a] lop off-IMP, [m-bur-eete] 1SG-lop off-IMPERF (Clements, 1985).
Local Assimilation, Complete

The feature [nasal] itself may assimilate (Cohn, 1990; Piggott, 1992; Walker, 1998). Vowels often become nasal adjacent to a nasal consonant. In French, [bon] good becomes [bo ]. In Sundanese (Sunda), [natur] arrange is pronounced [na tur] (Robins, 1957). Assimilation of nasality from consonant to consonant is found in Twi, when a root-initial voiced stop follows the negative prefix: [me-gu/] I pour, [me-n-nu] I do not pour. Another common assimilation is voicing assimilation. Clusters of obstruents often assimilate in voicing, usually regressively. In Russian, for example, a string of obstruents always agrees in voicing with the final obstruent in the sequence: [od vzbu tski] from a scolding, [ot fsple ska] from a splash (Jakobson, 1978). Generally, sonorants do not participate in voicing assimilation (note that the [l] in [fsple ska] neither becomes voiceless nor causes the preceding consonants to become voiced), though there are cases of sonorantobstruent voicing assimilations. Postnasal voicing is attested in a number of languages, for example Kikuyu (Gikuyu) [tEm-a] cut-IMP, [n-dEm-EEtE] 1SG-cut-IMPERF (Clements, 1985; see also Hayes, 1999 and Pater, 1999 for further examples and discussion). Voicing assimilation from consonant to vowel is found in Japanese, where high vowels become voiceless if surrounded by voiceless

Several African languages have rules of complete vowel assimilation at word boundaries (Welmers, 1973). In Yoruba, for example, [owo] money plus [epo] oil becomes [oweepo] oil money. In Igbo, [nwoke] man plus [a] DET becomes [nwokaa] that man. Total assimilation of consonants is found in English [in-] assimilation to [l] and [r] (mentioned above) as in illegal and irreconcilable. Another example of complete assimilation involving [l] is found in Arabic: the [l] of the definite prefix [ al] assimilates completely to a following coronal consonant: [ al-kitaab] the book but [ as-sams] the sun, [ ad-daar] the house, [ an-nahr] the river (Kenstowicz, 1994).
Long-Distance Assimilation

Long-distance assimilation is known as harmony. Vowel harmony is a type of assimilation in which all vowels in a certain domain (usually the word) must agree in one or more features. Vowel harmony has been extensively discussed in the phonological literature, and harmony systems involving backness, rounding, vowel height, and advanced vs. retracted tongue root have been described: see van der Hulst and van de Weijer (1995) for an overview. In

Assimilation 555

Hungarian, for example, suffix vowels assimilate in backness to the root vowel: [ha:z-nak] to the house, [va:ros-nak] to the city, [vi:z-nek] to the water, [yrnek] to the gap (Ringen, 1988; see also Vago, 1976, Goldsmith, 1985). In Turkish, high vowels agree with a preceding vowel in both backness and rounding, while nonhigh vowels agree in backness. Some oftcited examples from Turkish (Clements and Sezer, 1982) include:
(2) genitive sg. ip-in ki $z-i $n jyz-yn pul-un genitive pl. ip-ler-in ki $z-lar-i $n jyz-ler-in pul-lar-i $n rope girl face stamp

consonants, and vice versa (though a possible counterexample is proposed by Kaisse, 1992). Nor does the feature [sonorant] assimilate, except as a byproduct of nasal assimilation or complete assimilation. The sequence [dr], for example, does not become [lr]. Stress does not assimilate. An unstressed syllable adjacent to a stressed syllable does not become stressed rather the opposite: two adjacent stressed syllables or two adjacent unstressed syllables are avoided.

Assimilation and Phonological Theory

If linguistic theory is concerned with the question of What is a possible human language? then phonological theory must be concerned with the question of What is a possible process of assimilation? The best theory would be powerful enough to encode all actually occurring assimilatory patterns, but constrained enough to rule out impossible patterns.
Feature-Changing Rules

In many West African languages, all vowels in a word must agree in the feature [advanced (or retracted) tongue root] (Welmers, 1973; Archangeli and Pulleyblank, 1989, Zsiga, 1997). In Igbo, [O-SIala] s/he has told contains only vowels from the retracted set, [o-si-ele] s/he has cooked has vowels only from the advanced set. Several Austronesian languages exhibit long-distance nasal harmony. Nasal assimilation in Sundanese (Robins, 1957; Cohn, 1990) may extend over a sequence of vowels and glides: [Ja a n] wet. Rose and Walker (2004) discuss nasal harmony from consonant to consonant in Kikongo (Kango): [m-bud-idi] I hit, [tu-kun-ini] we planted. Consonant harmony such as that seen in Kikongo is less common than vowel harmony. Attested cases involve long-distance assimilation of nasality, laryngeal features, and subsidiary place features such as [retroflex] or [anterior] (Hansson, 2001; Rose and Walker, 2004). One well-known example is anterior assimilation in Chumash (Poser, 1982): all coronal fricatives and affricates in a word must agree with the rightmost fricative or affricate in the value of [/anterior]: [k-sunon-us] I obey him, [k-sunon-s] I am obedient. Finally, tone may assimilate from vowel to vowel, or syllable to syllable. In Shona, for example, a string of suffixes following a low toned root will be low toned ([e ` re ` Ng] read, [ku ` re ` Ng-e ` s-e ` r-a ` ] to make read -e to) and a string of suffixes following a high-toned root will be high toned ([te Ng] buy, [ku Ng-e s-e r-a ] -te to sell to) (Myers, 1990; Kenstowicz, 1994). The long-distance behavior of tone was instrumental in the development of the theory of autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith, 1976, discussed below).
Some Assimilations That Do Not Occur

In the formal theory of Chomsky and Halle (1968), processes of assimilation were expressed as feature changing rules of the form A ! B/ C D (A changes to B in the context of CAD). The crucial concept of feature matching in assimilation was expressed via alpha notation. Greek letters stand for variables over and , and every instance of the variable in a rule must be filled in with the same value. Thus
(3) [-sonorant] ! [avoice]/ [-sonorant, avoice]

would be read an obstruent agrees in voicing with a following obstruent. The Catalan nasal assimilation rule in (1) above would be:
(4) [nasal] ! [a coronal]/ [b anterior] [g labial] [d back] [E high] [f distributed] [a coronal] [b anterior] [g labial] [d back] [E high] [f distributed]

Feature-changing rules, however, are both too powerful, and not powerful enough (Bach, 1968; Anderson, 1985). They are too powerful in that nothing rules out impossible rules like that in (5):
(5) [-sonorant] ! [avoice] / [-sonorant, aback]

The feature [/-consonantal] does not assimilate. Vowels adjacent to consonants do not become

In this rule, a consonants voicing value must match its feature for back, yet this impossible rule is identical in formal complexity to the common rule of obstruent voicing assimilation. Feature-changing rules are not powerful enough, however, in that the

556 Assimilation

common and straightforward process of nasal place assimilation is represented via a complicated formula.
Feature-Spreading Rules

nonrepresentational account of feature classes in assimilation.

Constraints

In the theory of autosegmental phonology, assimilation is formalized as feature spreading. A feature is linked to a segment via an association line, and features may spread (assimilate) via the addition of further associations. Obstruent voicing assimilation would be formalized as in (6).
(6)

The voicing feature begins as a property of the second consonant in the cluster (indicated by the solid line), but comes to be shared between the two (indicated by the addition of the dotted line). Thus assimilation is given a privileged status as an elementary operation, while more complicated feature switches have a correspondingly more complicated representation. Longdistance assimilation is easily handled as spreading over longer domains. The features [sonorant] and [consonantal] form the core of the segment, the root node, and do not themselves spread. Different hierarchical groupings of autosegmental features (feature geometries) have been proposed to account for the fact that certain groups of features (such as the place features in Catalan or the laryngeal features in Greek) assimilate together (Clements, 1985). If all of the place features are grouped under a single node, then place assimilation can be formalized as the addition of a single association line, the formal simplicity mirroring the rules ubiquity.
(7)

In a nonderivational constraint-based theory such as optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 2004), there is no reference to rules or processes of assimilation. Rather, markedness constraints, which define preferred and dispreferred linguistic structures, are argued to prefer sequences where features agree, or where features spread over a certain domain. Such constraints may be grounded in either ease of articulation (e.g., switching voicing in the middle of an obstruent cluster is hard) or ease of perception (e.g., cues to place of articulation in preconsonantal nasals are hard to hear.) Specific assimilations are seen in languages that give specific markedness constraints high priority, and are not seen in languages that give higher priority to maintaining underlying specifications. Kaun (1995), Beckman (1998), and Bakovic (2000) provide constraint-based accounts of vowel harmony. Lombardi (1999) discusses voicing assimilation, and Padgett (1995) provides an account of nasal place assimilation. McCarthy (2004) provides a critical review of ALIGN and SPREAD constraints, and proposes an alternative analysis.

Assimilation vs. Co-articulation

Phonological assimilation can be distinguished from phonetic co-articulation. Daniel Jones, in his Outline of English phonetics (1940), distinguished assimilation, which he defined as a change in phonemic status, and similitude, in which two sounds become more alike but do not change their phonemic identity. In the foregoing discussion, it has been assumed that phonological assimilation results in a change in a segments phonological features (from [voice] to [voice], for example), and thus the segments phonological category. In co-articulation, there is no change in phonological category, but only in phonetic realization. Two articulatory gestures overlap in time, and thus may exert a physical influence on one another. For example, the [k] in key is pronounced further forward than the [k] in coo, because the former is overlapped in time (coarticulated) with a front vowel and the latter is coarticulated with a back vowel. In English, vowels are nasalized before a nasal consonant, because the velum begins to open before closure for the consonant is achieved (Cohn, 1990). Phonological assimilation is complete and categorical; phonetic coarticulation may be gradient and variable (Keating, 1990).

Consensus has not been reached, however, on a universal geometry that can capture all the relevant groupings needed. Harmony systems such as Turkish, where [back] and [round] (but not other vowel features) spread together, have proven problematic. Another challenge is accounting for the fact that consonants are sometimes transparent to vowel assimilations (as in vowel harmony), and sometimes participate in vowel assimilations (as in palatalization). McCarthy (1988), gave an overview of one widely accepted geometry. Hume (1992) and Clements (1993) suggested a different set of class nodes, and Padgett (1995) provided an alternative,

Assimilation 557

It may sometimes be difficult, however, to empirically distinguish the two. Browman and Goldstein (1990, 1992), in the theory of articulatory phonology, showed that overlap and blending of articulatory gestures can result in apparently complete assimilation without any change of phonological features. They argue that in phrases like hundre[b] pounds and i[m] pairs the word-final coronal is still articulatorily present, as shown by phonetic imaging techniques. Assimilation is perceived because a coronal and a labial pronounced at the same time sound like an assimilated labial. Assimilation of alveolar [n] to dental [y], as in the pronunciation of ten things in English, or in the Catalan case discussed above, can also be accounted for in terms of articulatory overlap, as two different overlapping gestures blend to an intermediate place of articulation. Articulatory phonology argues that all assimilations can be accounted for in terms of gestural overlap. Studies such as Cohn (1990) and Zsiga (1995, 1997), however, showed that categorical and gradient processes of assimilation must be distinguished. Cohn (1990) described both gradient and categorical processes of nasal assimilation. Zsiga (1995) showed that the categorical assimilation of [s] to [s] in pressure is qualitatively and quantitatively different from the partial and gradient change in the phrase press your point. Zsiga (1997) examined Igbo [ATR] vowel harmony and vowel assimilation, showing that harmony is categorical and featural, while assimilation (except in some very common phrases like [nwoka-a] from [nwoke-a]) is gradient and the result of gestural overlap. It is argued that phonological features may be mapped into articulatory gestures, but that the phonological and phonetic modules should remain separate.

apparent action-at-a-distance can be reanalyzed, and all assimilation be constrained to be strictly local.

Conclusion
Assimilation is the most common of all phonological processes, and thus has played an important role in phonological theory. Phonological theories have sought to capture what sorts of assimilation can and cannot occur, what groups of features assimilate together, and why certain segments participate in assimilations while others do not. Current work on assimilation is teasing apart the contributions of articulatory coarticulation and phonological feature switch, and continues to examine the proper formalization of local and long-distance assimilations.
See also: Dissimilation; Harmony; Hungarian: Phonology; Phonology: Optimality Theory.

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Is All Assimilation Local Assimilation?

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