This study employs Harmonic Serialism (HS) to revisit phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy (PCSA) in Korean nominal suffixes. Multiple inputs and allomorph ordering has been suggested due to cases of allomorphy that phonological information alone has trouble accounting for. PCSA in Korean nominal suffixes provides another example, calling for both phonological and morpho-syntactic information. In particular, a special apparatus like Default (Bye 2007) or Priority (Mascaró 2007) is in need to select a marked or non-TETU allomorph as a preferred one over its unmarked or TETU counterpart. Drawing on previous works, the present study compares the analysis in classic OT with that in HS. It is shown here that the basic tenets of HS, gradualness and harmonic improvement, account for the phenomenon in a simple and natural way.

The present study compares two approaches to syllabification in Harmonic Serialism (HS): one as a distinct phonological operation and the other as a non-distinct operation. According to McCarthy (2007), GEN in Harmonic Serialism is confined to a single unfaithful operation at a time. If syllabification is a non-distinct and automatic operation, it can apply in a single pass to a series of segments (McCarthy 2009). However, if syllabification is treated as a distinct and separate operation (Elfner 2009), it has to take place sequentially, each syllable generated in a separate step just like other unfaithful operations such as deletion, insertion, or feature change. By adopting the framework of HS, this study considers an interaction between tensing, a feature changing operation, and consonant cluster simplification. The findings of this study are that syllabification in HS should be a distinct operation, confirming the argument of Elfner (2009), and that HS gives a better account of opacity in tensing than OT-CC does in terms of descriptive and explanatory adequacy.