TONGUE ROOT HARMONY AND VOWEL CONTRAST IN NORTHEAST ASIAN LANGUAGES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Seongyeon Ko August 2012 © 2012 Seongyeon Ko TONGUE ROOT HARMONY AND VOWEL CONTRAST IN NORTHEAST ASIAN LANGUAGES Seongyeon Ko, Ph. D. Cornell University 2012 This dissertation investigates the synchrony and diachrony of the vocalism of a variety of Northeast Asian languages, especially Korean, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages, which have traditionally been described as having developed from a palatal system. The dissertation rewrites the vocalic history by demonstrating that the original vowel harmony in these languages was in fact based on an RTR, rather than a palatal, contrast, and provides a formal account for the development of individual vowel systems within the framework of Contrastive Hierarchy (Dresher, 2009). Following the general and theoretical background in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 begins to explore how the vowel contrasts in the modern Mongolic languages are hierarchically structured. It proceeds to propose an RTR analysis for Old Mongolian (contra Poppe, 1955) based on a combination of arguments from the comparative method, the typology of vowel shifts, and the phonetics of vowel features. Consequently, the palatal system in Kalmyk/Oirat is understood not as a retention but an innovation as a result of an RTR-to-palatal shift, contra Svantesson‘s (1985) palatal-to-RTR shift hypothesis. Chapter 3 presents an innovative view that Middle Korean had an RTR contrast-based vowel system and that various issues in Korean historical phonology receive better treatment under the contrastive hierarchy approach. Chapter 3 also argues that Ki-Moon Lee‘s (1964, 1972) Korean vowel shift hypothesis is untenable, based on the RTR analysis of Old Mongolian presented in Chapter 2. Chapter 4 shows that an RTR-based contrastive hierarchy analysis also holds for the lesser-studied Tungusic languages including Proto-Tungusic. Turning to theoretical issues, Chapter 5 investigates the minimal difference between Mongolic vs. Tungusic /i/ in terms of its transparency/opacity to labial harmony (van der Hulst & Smith, 1988). The contrastive hierarchy approaches to the Mongolic and Tungusic vowel systems in the previous chapters, coupled with a ―fusional harmony‖ approach (Mester, 1986), provide a very simple but elegant solution to the minimal difference between the two languages, allowing us to maintain the Contrastivist Hypothesis (Hall, 2007). Chapter 6 addresses empirical and theoretical implications of the major findings in the main chapters and concludes the thesis. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Seongyeon Ko was born in Jeju, Korea on September 25, 1974. He graduated from Ohyun High School in Jeju and moved to Seoul, Korea, in 1993 to attend Seoul National University, where he majored in Linguistics. He served in the Korean Army from May, 1996 to July, 1998. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics in 2000 and a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics in 2002 with a specialization in phonology. While pursuing a Ph.D. degree there, he participated in various research projects including one dubbed ASK REAL (The Altaic Society of Korea--Researches on the Endangered Altaic languages), which laid the empirical foundation for his Ph.D. research at Cornell University (2005-2012). He will start to teach at Queens College, City University of New York, in Fall 2012, as assistant professor of Korean language and linguistics in the Department of Classics, Middle Eastern, Asian Languages & Cultures. iii DEDICATION To my parents, Jungsong Koh and Jungja Kang. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First of all, I would like to thank the three members of my Special Committee, John Whiman, Draga Zec, and Abby Cohn, for their support, guidance, and patience. I would never have been able to finish my dissertation without the guidance of my advisor, John Whitman, who played a pivotal role in shaping my embryonic ideas into the present thesis with his broad and deep knowledge of East Asian languages and linguistics. I have learned a great deal from him not only as an excemptional advisor, but also as a model linguist (and a model academic in general), a paragon of teaching, and a generous landlord of what I dubbed ―the Whitman House.‖ Draga Zec first served as the designated chair of my Special Committee for the first two years after I arrived at Cornell. Her attentiveness helped me get through the first-year crises such as a feeling of alienation as a shy international student. Since then, she has been constantly involved in, and an integral part of, every aspect of the development of my research agenda. With her keen insight and fountain of knowledge on any topic in phonological theory, she often grasped the point out of my gibberish and guided me to a simpler but better solution to a seemingly raveled skein of complicated problems. Abby Cohn, though she joined my committee only after my A-exam, was the one who encouraged me to keep working on my final squib on Middle Korean submitted for her seminar course. That squib was developed as one of my A-papers, and eventually became Chapter 3 of this dissertation. When I was having difficulty in making progress faced with John‘s long-term absence, she was there to play the supervisor‘s role as a proxy when I needed it most. Her extensive knowledge on phonology, phonetics, and their interface, coupled with her unmatched enthusiasm, has helped me improve every single page of the final version. v I also thank Michael Wagner and Julie Legate for their willingness to be members of my Special Committee while they were at Cornell. Michael brought to my attention Dresher‘s theory of contrastive hierarchy and helped me digest it from A to Z. Julie has broadened my research interests to fieldwork-based formal syntax, which surely will frame my post-dissertation research on the morphosyntax of endangered Northeast Asian languages. I am also grateful to other Cornell faculty members Dorit Abusch, John Bowers, Wayles Browne, Molly Diesing, John Hale, Wayne Harbert, Sue Hertz, Sarah Murray, Alan Nussbaum, Mats Rooth, Sam Tilsen, and Michael Weiss, who taught and supported me in various ways. This dissertation project has its roots in my graduate research in the Linguistics Department at Seoul National University, where I was lucky to have the privilege of taking an active part in a research project called REAL (Researches on Endangered Altaic Languages) under the guidance of Prof. Juwon Kim. I was so deeply inspired by his works on Middle Korean and Tungusic vowel harmony that in many cases I simply fleshed out his original ideas within a more contemporary theoretical framework. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Prof. Yangsoo Moon who taught me phonology for the first time when I was an undergraduate student, accepted me into the graduate school, and guided my M.A. thesis. I am also very much indebted to Professors Baegin Seong, Hyunbok Lee, Younhan Kim, Chungmin Lee, Jae-il Kwon, Seungjae Lee, Seungho Nam, Jongho Jun, Hoyoung Lee, Hyopil Shin, and Dongho Ko for their guidance and support throughout my years at SNU. I thank Elan Dresher, Jerold Edmondson, György Kara, Larry Hyman, Martine Robbeets, J. Marshall Unger, Bert Vaux, and Rachel Walker for their insightful questions, comments, encouragements, and generous sharing of their work. In particular, I am deeply indebted to Elan Dresher for his considerable body of work on contrast, which provides the theoretical foundation of the analyses presented in this vi dissertation. I was first inspired by his article on Written Manchu, then more intrigued by a lecture he gave at Cornell, and later personally encouraged in an individual meeting to fully develop my rudimentary ideas on the history of the Korean vowel system. I would also like to say ―bayarlalaa (thank you)‖ to my ―bagshi (teacher)‖ Tserenchunt Legden and her family, who instructed me in Mongolian language and culture in the Summer of 2010. My fellow linguists at Cornell have always cheered me up in various ways while I was dissertating: my same-year cohort, Masayuki Gibson, Zhiguo Xie, and Jiwon Yun; my ―roomies‖ in B12, Becky Butler and Peggy Renwick; my dear friends in the P-lab, Christina Bjorndahl, Alison Fisher, Jo Johnson, Esra Kesici, Teresa Galloway, Steven Ikier, Satoshi Ito, and Marie-Josée L‘Espérance; and my colleagues in the C-lab, Neil Ashton, Zhong Chen, Anca Cherecheş, Nan Li, and David Lutz. Special thanks to Christina (and Adam) Bjorndahl for stimulating me to become more sociable and sharing all the good memories of hanging out together. Also, thank you to my Cornell ―senpay‖ (先輩 せんぱい), Adam Cooper, Effi Georgala, Andrew Joseph, Hyun Kyung Hwang, Hye-Sook Lee, and Nikola Predolac for their constant support and friendship. Special thanks go to Andrew Joseph for the time and effort he invested when proofreading my draft. His expertise in Manchu-Tungus and Mongolic languages has helped me significantly improve the clarity, coherence, and consistency in my analyses, arguments, and data. I also thank my friends from Seoul National University, Eunji Kang, Hijo Kang, Hyun Kyung Hwang, Seunghun Julio Lee, and Sangchul Park for their help in various forms at different stages of the development of this dissertation. vii Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved wife, Jiwon Yun, who is always the most beautiful girl in my world, for her unwavering