Iconicity correlated with vowel harmony in Korean ideophones

This paper aims to establish connections between the following phenomena pertaining to Korean ideophonic vowel harmony: A set of vowel patterns classified (phonologically) as ‘harmonic,’ ‘neutral,’ and ‘disharmonic’; a set of ideophones classified (semantically) as onomatopoeic vs. cross-modal; and a set of form-meaning mappings classified (semiotically) as higher vs. lower in iconicity. Onomatopoeic ideophones represent sounds in the external world by linguistic sounds. To do so effectively requires taking whatever phonological and phonotactic liberties are needed. This predicts that (a) onomatopoeic ideophones will show great diversity in harmony patterns and, in contrast, (b) cross-modal ideophones that capture sensory imagery by using more abstract iconic mappings (Dingemanse et al., 2016) will have more ‘room’ to conform to vowel harmony. To test these hypotheses, the distribution of harmony patterns in onomatopoeic vs. cross-modal ideophones was examined, using a written corpus of Korean ideophonic stems. The results supported the hypotheses by revealing that onomatopoeic ideophones are skewed toward a larger proportion of disharmonic forms compared to cross-modal ideophones