UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2012) Vowel Harmony as Agreement by Correspondence Russell Rhodes UC Berkeley Introduction Initially, it was believed that blocking effects 1 simply could not be modeled with Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) (Hansson 2001; Rose & Walker 2004). Hansson, in particular, lays out this assumption very clearly: “Intervening segments do not themselves enter into the agreement relation holding between the trigger-target pair, and therefore they must be irrelevant to that relation: they cannot be opaque” (237, his emphasis). The model’s assumed inability to account for opaque segments was seen as a positive with respect to accounting for consonant harmony 2 because blocking effects are extremely rare in consonant harmony systems 3 . However, since opaque segments are common in vowel harmony systems, it was unclear how applicable ABC would be to vowel harmony. In spite of this, Rose & Walker are optimistic about the possibility of analyzing at least some vowel harmony systems as ABC: Vowel harmony presents a promising area in which to explore further applications of the ABC approach . . . [C]ertain cases of rounding harmony limit the participant segments to ones that are similar, specifically, they match in height. In addition, many patterns of vowel harmony show nonlocal interactions across intervening transparent vowels, sug- gesting that ABC might be at work . . . The suitability of an ABC approach for such patterns would need to be assessed in the context of individual case studies. (520) The current paper, presents two such case studies in an effort to assess the suitability of the ABC approach, not just for these two systems, but for vowel harmony more generally. After an introduction to ABC and a review of the history of blocking and ABC in §2, §3 contains the case study of Khalkha Mongolian rounding harmony. Khalkha offers a particularly good test case because it is exactly the type of system that Rose & Walker suggest could be analyzed as ABC. Rounding harmony is restricted to vowels agreeing in height and shows nonlocal interactions across intervening transparent vowels. Additionally, Khalkha presents a challenge because it involves a When I say blocking effects, I am referring to any situation where the presence of a segment between a trigger of harmony and a potential target of harmony prevents that potential target from agreeing with the trigger for the harmony feature. I will be using the term opacity interchangeably with blocking effects and I will refer to the segment that blocks harmony as an opaque segment. Consonant harmony is also sometimes referred to as Long Distance Consonant Agreement. There are only two attested cases of blocking in consonant harmony systems: Ineseno Chumash sibilant harmony (Poser 1982; Applegate 1972) and Kinyarwanda coronal harmony (Walker & Mpiranya 2006). Though, it is worth noting that, although Hansson (2001:Ch. 5) demonstrated that the blocking in Chumash sibilant harmony can be accounted for using ABC augmented with targeted constraints (Wilson 2000, 2001), the case of Kinyarwanda coronal harmony is more problematic for ABC. In fact, Walker & Mpiranya (2006) analyze the harmony not as ABC, but as featural spreading.