Chapter 7 deals with a longstanding controversy from both historical and theoretical linguistic perspectives. The chapter provides a description of Korean vowel harmony beginning with an overview of its historical and theoretical linguistic background. Middle Korean displays relatively rigorous patterns of vowel harmony; contemporary varieties show reduced but still complicated patterns that are confined to certain morphological contexts, as a result of historical changes. The description of Korean vowel harmony in this chapter is divided mainly into two parts: the relatively complete vowel harmony system in Middle Korean, and vowel harmony in contemporary (chiefly Seoul) Korean. The former provides an historical and typological overview of the productive MK patterns, while the latter focuses on the exceptions and variations of the remnant harmony patterns in ideophones and verbal inflections. The remainder of the chapter introduces a number of theoretical approaches, from early generative treatments to more recent Optimality Theoretic analyses.

Chapter 2 discusses some of the most salient and yet persistently controversial and significant phenomena in Korean phonology: lenis obstruent voicing, stop neutralization, consonant cluster simplification, consonant assimilation, consonantal fortition, Saisiot, vowel deletion and insertion, vowel devoicing and assimilation, monophthongization, vowel harmony, and sound symbolism. The chapter focuses on the Seoul Standard Dialect. One salient and recurrent theme is the theoretical issue of the relative strength of each sound, both inherent and in its environment. Some sounds are held to be “stronger” than others; we see that these sounds are exploited not only in sound symbolism but also in the application or non-application of certain rules. Boundaries play a significant role in Korean phonology and are analyzed as prosodic units in contemporary analyses. The Korean-specific basis of articulation, particularly obligatory unreleasing, results in many interesting weakening effects, including consonant cluster simplification, various assimilatory phenomena, and various consonant and vowel insertions by backward generalizations.

In this chapter we consider the interaction of morphology and phonology. We begin with a look at allomorphy, distinguishing predictible allomorphy, partially predictable allomorphy, and idiosyncratic or unpredictable allomorphy. Students learn to look for phonological rules that create predictable allomorphy. Students are introduced to the ways in which the syllable structure of a language can interact with its morphology. Students are also introduced to the idea of lexical strata, looking at differences in behavior between various English derivational affixes. This chapter also includes a ‘how to’ section on analyzing morphologically induced phonological rules.

This chapter focuses of languages of Northern Eurasia. In particular, Finno-Ugric, Samoyedic, Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic languages are discussed, along with other, unrelated languages of Siberia. Their geographical distribution, historical relatedness and linguistic peculiarities (such as vowel harmony and agglutinative morphology) are outlined and illustrated. The final section illuminates one linguistic feature common to many languages of the region: the so-called evidential markers, which indicate the source of evidence for the speaker’s assertion.