Harmony refers broadly to the spread of a phonological property from a trigger segment to one or more undergoer segments within some domain. Transparency to harmony refers to a situation in which some segments in a domain do not take on a harmonizing property but rather have apparently been skipped over by a harmony process. There are also cases in which segments in a harmony domain appear to have only partially undergone harmony. These partial undergoers assimilate to a trigger segment with respect to a harmonizing property, but do not necessarily take on that property completely. This sort of partial harmony is most commonly exemplified by cases of partial height harmony, in which an undergoer vowel approaches the height of a trigger vowel without necessarily reaching it. Often, such partial height harmony proceeds in a stepwise fashion, with each undergoer taking one step toward the height of the trigger along a scale of vowel height. One such stepwise height harmony is the vowel raising harmony of Nzebi (Bantu; Gabon; Guthrie 1968, Clements 1991, Kirchner 1996, Parkinson 1996). In Nzebi, the suffix /-i-/ occurs immediately after verb stems in some tenses. This high vowel triggers singlestep raising of preceding non-reduced stem vowels.1 As part of this raising process, the high-mid vowels /e/ and /o/ surface faithfully when no high suffix vowel follows, as in (1a‐c). However, they surface as [i] and [u], respectively, before suffix [i], as in (1d-f).
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