Morphemic harmony as featural correspondence

This paper presents a classification of vowel harmony, separating prototypical phonological harmony from morphemic harmony, which is triggered by the presence of particular morphemes. Morphemic harmony is driven by featural correspondence constraints requiring the realization of a feature across an output domain; phonological harmony is driven by markedness constraints requiring featural identity across an output domain. Morphemic harmony must always impose a fixed featural value on the form, which cannot be accounted for using approaches to phonological harmony. Phonological harmony cannot be incorporated into an analysis of morphemic harmony because morphemic harmony is represented only in terms of triggers, while exceptions to phonological harmony are generally represented in terms of targets. Typological predictions to the correspondence approach to morphemic harmony are also explored, including gapped representations, edge-only effects, and the variability of the realization of multiple features in morphemic harmony. Extensions of the present proposal are provided, illustrating that general featural affixation can be accounted for with morpheme-feature correspondence. Alternatives are also discussed.