Vowel Harmony in Korean and Morpheme Correspondence1

The two most controversial aspects of vowel harmony in Korean ideophones are its morphologically restricted nature and the harmonic feature governing these alternations. Not only is the harmony pattern restricted to the ideophone class2, but also the value of the harmonic feature determines the meaning of the ideophone itself. While alternations from one feature to another involve relative lowering of vowels, and thus appear to be a lowering process, this is complicated by the fact that [] and [o] are phonetically the same height (Yang 1992), but belong to different harmonic classes. While previous analyses have acknowledged the morphological nature of vowel harmony in Korean ideophones (Ahn and Kim 1984; Cho 1994; Chung 2000; Kim-Renaud 1976; Sohn 1986), these analyses do not formally distinguish between the type of morphological harmony found in Korean ideophones, and the more common forms of phonological harmony found elsewhere. Both the harmonic feature problem and the morphological nature of Korean vowel harmony can be straightforwardly accounted for when a faithfulness-based correspondence approach is used to account for the appearance of harmony. The analysis is presented as follows: I begin with a presentation of data on vowel harmony in Korean ideophones, followed by a summary of problems presented in previous work on Korean vowel harmony. I then present a faithfulness-based correspondence analysis of the data using morpheme-specific constraints. I also discuss the relation between the Harmony/Inventory Theorem and morphological vowel harmony, showing that a faithfulness account of vowel harmony predicts that violations of this theorem may occur in morphological harmony of the type found in Korean.