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Lee, Minkyung. 2015. Tongue-Height Harmony in Kinyarwanda Verbal Morphology. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 23(1), 23-42. In autosegmental phonology, vowel harmony (VH) is considered assimilation as feature spreading. However, in Optimality Theory (OT) based upon serialism, this central insight is embodied by local optimality and gradualness via the Gen-Eval loop. Tongue-height harmony found in Kinyarwanda is rightward spreading from a root to suffixes over a morpheme boundary. A mid vowel in a root triggers height harmony, thus suffix vowels are lowered to be mid. Here interestingly, only tongue height feature spreads, thus mid [o] cannot surface in suffixes due to the feature cooccurrence restriction. Furthermore, root high vowels are transparent in VH while root low vowels are neutral in VH. Therefore, height harmony in suffixes is banned due to the demand of markedness constraint and featural identity constraint. In essence, tongue- height harmony in Kinyarwanda verbal morphology is well couched into the major spirits of serial OT paradigm.

# serial OT # height harmony # high vowel transparency # low vowel neutrality # local optimality # gradualness