The base of Korean noun paradigms: Evidence from tone (original) (raw)
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Assibilation or analogy?: Reconsideration of Korean noun stem-endings
Studies in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, 2013
This paper discusses two previous approaches to the nominal stem-endings in Korean inflection, including loanwords: one is the assibilation approach, represented by H. Kim (2001), and the other is the analogy approach, represented by Albright (2002 et sequel) and Y. Kang (2003b). I contend that the assibilation approach is deficient in handling the underapplication to the non-nominal categories such as verb. More specifically, the assibilation approach is improper to explain why spirantization applies neither to derivative nouns nor to non-nominal items in entirety. By contrast, the analogy approach is able to overcome the difficulties involved with the assibilation position. What is crucial to the analogy approach is that the nominal bases end with t rather than with s. The evidence of tending bases is garnered from the base selection criteria, the disparity between tending and sending inputs in loanwords, and the alternations of stem-endings among t, s, ʧʰ, and ʧ. Unconventionally, I dare to contend that normative rules via orthography intervene as part of alternation extension, alongside semantic conditioning and token/type frequency.
1 Reanalysis and Regularization in Morphophonology : Korean Noun Inflection and Beyond
2018
The life cycle of phonological rules or processes is a concept that has been familiar to phonologists since the work of Kruszewski and Baudouin de Courtenay in the last decades of the 19th century. Coming into being with the phonologization (Hyman 1976) of mechanically determined phonetic variation and being as a result entirely general at the outset, phonological processes subsequently acquire morphosyntactic conditioning or come to apply in increasingly restricted morphological domains (Bermúdez-Otero 2007:504, 2015:382-384). Eventually, they may disappear from the grammar altogether, leaving traces of their former existence only in isolated alternations between lexically listed items; this is the case, for example, for the residue of Verner’s Law in English (was/were, lose/forlorn).
Base-Output Correspondence in Korean Nominal Inflection
Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 2006
This paper discusses various puzzles concerning the phonology of Korean nominal inflection. In particular, I investigate a range of vowel hiatus resolution phenomena that differ between nouns and verbs, the overapplication of consonant cluster simplification and laryngeal feature neutralization in nominal stems, and certain asymmetries between derived nouns and nonderived nouns. After presenting some problems with previous approaches, I offer an analysis of the phonology of Korean nominal inflection in terms of Base-Output Correspondence (BOC) Theory, along the lines of Kager (1999). I argue that a variety of unexpected properties of noun phonology in Korean can receive a unified account under the BOC approach. I also show that noun-specific alignment and noun-specific faithfulness constraints are inadequate to capture noun phonology in Korean. My arguments support the view that the fact that nouns have a Base (isolation form) is the key factor in explaining the unique properties of noun phonology (Kenstowicz's (1996) Base Identity, in particular). It is shown, however, that the BOC approach overcomes shortcomings with the Base Identity approach by making a necessary distinction between minor and fatal divergence from the Base. BASE-OUTPUT CORRESPONDENCE IN KOREAN NOMINAL INLFECTION 2 1. BASE-OUTPUT CORRESPONDENCE IN KOREAN NOMINAL INLFECTION 3 because of the requirement that nouns project a prosodic word. We can term this the Prosodic Approach which is represented by such works as Yongsung Lee (1999, 2001: Y. Lee, hereafter) and E. Kang (2000, 2001). Other researchers argue that nouns show peculiar behavior due to domain-specific faithfulness. We term this the Noun Faithfulness Approach which is represented by Smith (1997) and subsequent works. Still others argue that the complex behavior of nouns is traced to a morphologically related isolation form, the Base: the Base Identity Approach of Kenstowicz (1996). All these approaches seem to provide a plausible analysis for certain aspects of nouns in Korean. Crucially, however, the previous analyses do not adequately handle the full range of phenomena previously mentioned concerning the phonology of Korean nominal inflection. Furthermore, the data that each analysis covers do not overlap very much, and thus there has been no serious attempt to compare these competing analyses on the same ground. In this paper, I provide detailed arguments to show that on closer inspection, all the previous analyses have some problems in dealing with the puzzles concerning the noun-verb asymmetries in Korean. I propose a novel account for the phonology of Korean nouns by adopting Kager's (1999) Base-Output Correspondence (BOC) Theory. Specifically, I argue that the phonological complexity of nouns is tied to the morphological fact that nouns, not verbs, have a free-standing Base (cf. Kenstowicz 1996). Since nouns in Korean have a Base, they are significantly affected by the ranking of Base-output faithfulness constraints. Verbs in Korean, in contrast, have no Base, and thus they are not affected by Base-output faithfulness constraints. Consequently, the rankings of Base-output faithfulness constraints with respect to markedness constraints or inputoutput faithfulness constraints contribute to underapplication and overapplication of phonology BASE-OUTPUT CORRESPONDENCE IN KOREAN NOMINAL INLFECTION 4 in nouns, but not in verbs. Nonderived nouns behave like verbal stems because being unaffixed they too cannot be affected by Base-output (affixed form) faithfulness constraints. My proposal certainly inherits the insight of Kenstowicz's (1996) Base Identity approach concerning the special role of an isolation form in Korean phonology. However, it overcomes some remaining problems with the Base Identity approach. The original formulation of Base Identity requires complete identity between the output and the Base. Thus, it does not distinguish between minor and fatal deviation from the Base systematically (but see section 3.3.2 for discussions). The BOC analysis, on the other hand, evaluates the similarity between the output and the Base with respect to various relations defined in Correspondence Theory (McCarthy and Prince 1995, Kager 1999). Thus, under the BOC approach, the winning candidate may be quite different from the Base, yet be more faithful to the Base than the other losing candidates. In this paper, I show that BOC analysis resolves the puzzles that the previous Base Identity approach could not handle adequately-specifically, the cases in which some alternation from the Base is mandatory due to high ranked markedness constraints in Korean (e.g. intersonorant voicing). I also demonstrate that my proposal provides a unified account for a variety of noun-verb asymmetries in Korean, which have not been feasible under the previous analyses. BASE-OUTPUT CORRESPONDENCE IN KOREAN NOMINAL INLFECTION 6 2.1 Underapplication of Phonology in Nominal Inflection In Korean, vowel hiatus frequently arises when a vowel-final stem is followed by a vowel-initial suffix. The hiatus can be resolved by various processes such as glide formation, /ˆ/ deletion, and vowel coalescence (Y. Lee 1993). A noun-verb asymmetry is consistently observed in the hiatus resolution processes-particularly, in a stem-final position (cf. section 3.2.2 for hiatus resolution processes in nonderived contexts). Starting with glide formation, consider the verbal stems in (3) and the nominal stems in (4). When a stem ending with a high front vowel /i/ or a round vowel /u, o/ is followed by a vowel-initial suffix, the stem-final vowel is optionally turned into a glide: (3a). 2 Glide formation is obligatory if the output without glide formation yields two consecutive onsetless syllables: (3b). Crucially, however, glide formation is not applicable to a nominal stem-final vowel: (4)
Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Kobe Shoin 17:1-33, 2014
The assumption that speakers take isolation forms as basic in Korean noun inflection is confronted with an alternative according to which historically conservative forms are basic. That alternative is shown to be problematic, validating the original assumption. With that conclusion in place, the question of whether speakers analyze cases in which basic X alternates with multiple Y i by postulating multiple stochastic rules or by taking only the most frequent alternation as regular is raised. Predictions regarding the presence or absence of variation in innovative and established stems are generated for each mode of analysis, and searches of a new Korean subtitle corpus and of the internet are used to test those predictions. The conclusion is reached that only the most frequent alternation is phonologized; minor alternations are represented in the lexicon rather than as probabilistic rules.
A lexical account of inflectional suffixes in Korean
Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 1995
In this paper we give a reasonably comprehensive presentation of Korean inflectional suffixes, whose status has been somewhat controversial in the generative literature. We argue that nominal and verbal inflectional morphemes not only show phonological constituency with their hosts but also show evidence of lexical attachment, within the theory of Lexical Phonology and Morphology , , ). Consequently, the inflectional suffixes should combine with their hosts in a lexical formation component, separate from the syntax proper.
The “Gradient Structure” of Korean Words
Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle, 2011
propose a probabilistic analysis of Indo-European word structure in which they argue that morphological structure is non-discretei.e., that it is gradient. This paper argues for a similar "gradient structure" approach to Korean words, with a particular focus on Hannate ("Sino-Korean") words. Hannate words are usually considered loanwords, but most of them acquire their lexical category by combining with native suffixes, as with the adjective namca-tapta 'manly'. The word namsengmi 'masculine beauty' may be interpreted as a complex or a compound word, depending on the treatment of mi. This problem of determinability is similar to the ambiguity encountered in English neoclassical compounds (Bauer 1998) . The adoption of Hannate roots into Korean eliminates the ideographic and tonal information that fixes their meanings in Chinese. This paper helps shed light on the understanding of Hannate words in Korean and explores various ways that language contact and the borrowing of words have consequences for the expanded lexicon of the borrowing language, which includes native items, borrowed items, and the products of reanalysis and analogy by speakers over time. * I would like to thank Caitlin Keenan for proofreading this paper. The abbreviation used in this study are: GEN = genitive, LOC = locative, TOP = topic marker. The data are presented in the Yale system of Romanization which follows the morpho-phonemic spelling principles of the Korean alphabet, Hankul.
Quantitative Research on Suffixes and Grammatical Patterns in Present-day Korean
Second Language Research, 2001
In this paper, I will present a quantitative analysis of the frequency and ranking of the following items in modem Korean: (l) prefinal and final endings (the latter are used as conclusive or non-conclusive morphemes), and (2) the grammatical patterns (including adverbial phrases that are connected with the sentential adverbs). In 1997, I conducted the first survey of agg lutinating suffixes, entitled "Quantitative Research on Verbal Morphemes in Modern Korean" (Lee 1997b). 001 FE127 ta t:J-: 6039 002 FE042 n L 5790 003 FE021 ko:il : 3843 004 FE093 nun ~ : 30~ 005 PFE015 ess ~ : 2454 006 FE371 e <>1 2341 etc. Since then a couple of others' studies on the frequency of suffixes have been reported based on their larger corpus but those of grammatical patterns not yet done by others but me as below in this paper. 001 Igr.-e(a) kata-<>1(o~) 7tt:J-741 003 1-ci(yo)-Al (k) 539 005 1-ci anhta(-cito anhta) 468-Al ~t:J-(-Al.£ ~t:J-) etc. 002 2-ko iss ta 004 1-e cwuta 006-e(a) ota (gr.=grade)-:il 9J. t:J-fi37-<>1 'ft:J-468-<>1(or) .2.t:J-428 The above findings are useful in the following ways: First, they are instructive in developing a rational basis for pedagogical syllabi and materials in teaching Korean as a foreign or a second language. Second, the findings can also be applied to analyzing the order of presentation of morphemes in elementary Korean materials for children in Korea. Third, the findings are relevant to machine translation because they provide infonnation on which Korean expressions are more preferable in translation.
Nominal, verbal, and cross-categorial affixation in Korean
Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 1995
In this paper, I address a recent proposal by Yu-Cho and Sells (1995) to explicate the constraints on the morphosyntax of inflectional affixation in Korean based on the attribute TYPE, which in large measure coincides with the bound vs. free distinction but also diverges from it in crucial cases. The theory of TYPE offers an insightful account of a class of affixes-the cross-categorial affixes-that attach either to nominals or verbals. I suggest, however, that when a fuller range of relevant data is taken into account, constraints on inflectional affixation in Korean are better handled by the distinction between bound verbal roots vs. free nominal roots on the one hand, and that between affixes which attach to bound forms and those that combine with free forms. The alternative that is proposed overgenerates. To deal with this problem, non-morphological means of filtering overgeneration are suggested and argued to be necessary.