KO Seongyeon. (2011). Microvariation between Tungusic and Mongolic vowel harmony. Altai Hakpo 21: 147-179. The Altaic Society of Korea.

This paper presents a contrastive hierarchy (Dresher 2009) analysis of the microvariation between Oroqen (a Tungusic language) and Khalkha Mongolian (a Mongolic language) vowel harmony. Although these two languages have the same type of vowel harmony processes, namely tongue root harmony and labial harmony, there is a minimal contrast between the two with respect to the phonological behavior of the vowel /i/: Tungusic /i/ is opaque whereas Mongolic /i/ is transparent to labial harmony (van der Hulst & Smith 1988). This microvariation can be modeled as the minimal difference in the language-specific contrastive hierarchy: Tungusic [low] > [coronal] > [labial] > [RTR] (Zhang 1996) vs. Mongolic [coronal] > [low] > [labial] > [RTR] (Ko 2011). These minimally distinct hierarchies assign different output specifications for /i/, i.e., [−low, +cor] for Tungusic /i/ and simply [+cor] for Mongolic /i/, which explains the transparency of Mongolic /i/ to labial harmony assuming labial harmony in Tungusic and Mongolic as a ‘height-stratified’ harmony (Mester 1986).

Keywords: microvariation, contrastive hierarchy, Tungusic, Mongolic, vowel harmony, labial harmony, neutral vowel, transparency, opacity