earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is two-fold: (i) to review various approaches to ‘long-distance assimilation’ (namely, harmony) within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), and (ii) to examine which approach is the most successful to the process. In autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith 1976), the process is mainly accounted for by feature spreading, formalized by association lines between features and segments. However, the Optimality Theoretic approach requires a different perspective: it needs to involve, not rules forcing the harmonic features to spread, but constraint interaction filtering wrong candidates that are under- or over-harmonized. Various approaches have been introduced in this connection. This study classifies them into two main streams: (i) the autosegmental spreading approach, and (ii) the agree-based approach. Through the examination, this study shows that the agree-based approach, especially no-disagreement, is more successful than others to account for harmonic process. The approach without autosegmental representation does not require any specific pro- spreading constraint or representational modification for harmony, and does not induce any problems others have, such as wrong typological prediction and ‘sour-grapes property’. In conclusion, this study verifies that harmonic process can be accounted for without autosegmental spreading.