Cover not available
Article published In:
Korean Linguistics
Vol. 16:2 (2014) ► pp.111–143

The base of Korean noun paradigms

Evidence from tone

| Georgetown University, USA
| Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

This paper reports and analyzes the tonal patterns that emerge in South Kyengsang monosyllabic nouns that exhibit two well-known analogical changes in stem shape, one involving coronal obstruent codas and the other stems with an underlying cluster. By the first change, underlying and orthographic /nach/ ‘face’ inflects as nat̚, nach-ɨl (conservative) or nas-ɨl (innovative); and by the second underlying /talk/ ‘chicken’ inflects as tak̚, talk-ɨl (conservative) or tak-ɨl (innovative). We find that many such nouns with a high-low tonal pattern change to high-high when inflected with the segmentally innovative stem. We propose that this tonal change supports the model of Korean noun paradigms proposed in Albright (2008) and Do (2013) in which the citation form serves as the base for the construction of the suffixed forms. If the base is a neutralization site, then learners select the alternant in which they have the greatest confidence of scoring a correct hit when undoing the neutralization.

Keywords: Paradigms, analogy, base form, confidence
Published online: 26 January 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/kl.16.2.02do
References
Albright, Adam 2002a. The Identification of Bases in Morphological Paradigms. Ph. D. dissertation, UCLA, Los Angeles.
Albright, Adam 2002b The Lexical Bases of Morphological Well-formedness. Morphology 2000: Selected Papers from the 9th Morphology Meeting ed. by Sabrina Bendjaballah, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Oskar E. Pfeiffer & Maria D. Voeikova, 5–15. Vienna 24–28 February 2000 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Albright, Adam 2002c Islands of Reliability for Regular Morphology: Evidence from Italian. Language 78.4: 684–709. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Albright, Adam 2008 Explaining Universal Tendencies and Language Particulars in Analogical Change. Language Universals and Language Change ed. by Jeff Good, 144–181. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Albright, Adam & Bruce Hayes 2002 Modeling English Past Tense Intuitions with Minimal Generalization. Proceedings of the 2002 Workshop on Morphological Learning ed. by Michael Maxwell, 58–69. (Association of Computational Linguistics), Philadelphia: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Albright, Adam & Youngah Do 2013 Featural Overlap Facilitates Learning of Phonological Alternations. The 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Boston, MA.
Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker & Steven Walker 2014 Lme4: Linear mixed-effects Models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.0–6. Online: [URL].
Bybee, Joan 2001 Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chang, Seung-Eun 2007 The Phonetics and Phonology of South Kyungsang Korean Tones. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Texas, Austin.
Do, Youngah 2013 Biased Learning of Phonological Alternations. Ph. D. dissertation, Massachu­setts Institute of Techonology, Cambridge.
Do, Youngah, Chiyuki Ito & Michael Kenstowicz 2014 Accent Classes in South Kyengsang Korean: Lexical Drift, Novel Words, and Loanwords. Lingua 1481: 147–182. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
He, Wung 1955 Pangcem yenkwu [Study on tone marks]. Tongpang Hakci 21: 37–194.Google Scholar
Ernestus, Miriam & Harald Baayen 2003 Predicting the Unpredictable: Interpreting Neutralized Segments in Dutch. Language 791: 5–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ito, Chiyuki 2010 Analogy and Lexical Restructuring in the Development of Nominal Stem Inflection from Middle to Contemporary Korean. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 191: 357–383. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jun, Jongho 2010 Stem-final Obstruent Variation in Korean. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 191: 137–179. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kang, Yoonjung 2003 Sound Changes Affecting Noun-final Coronal Obstruents in Korean. Japanese/Korean Linguistics 121 ed. by William McClure, 128–139. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Kenstowicz, Michael 1996 Base Identity and Uniform Exponence: Alternatives to Cyclicity. Current Trends in Phonology: Models and Methods ed. by Jacques Durand & Bernard Laks, 363–394. Salford: University of Salford.Google Scholar
Kenstowicz, Michael & Hyang-Sook Sohn 2001 Accentual Adaptation in North Kyungsang Korean. Ken Hale: A Life in Language ed. by Michael Kenstowicz, 239–270. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kenstowicz, Michael & Chiyoun Park 2006 Laryngeal Features and Tone in Kyungsang Korean: A Phonetic Study. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 121: 247–264.Google Scholar
Kenstowicz, Michael, Hyesun Cho & Jieun Kim 2007 Contrasts, Mergers, and Acquisitions in Kyungsang Accent. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 281: 107–122.Google Scholar
Kim, Chin-Wu 1972 Two Phonological Notes: A-sharp and B-flat. Contributions to Generative Phonology ed. by Michael Brame, 155–170. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Kim, Cha-kyun 1975 Kyengsangto pangen.ui sengcohyeng [Tonal types in South Kyengsang Korean]. Ehak Yenkwu 11.2: 119–137.Google Scholar
Kim, Hung-Gyu & Beom-Mo Kang 2000 Frequency Analysis of Korean Morpheme and Word Usage. Technical report, Institute of Korean culture. Seoul: Korea University. [URL].Google Scholar
Kim, Michael 1997 Korean Monosyllables: Floating V-slot and Edge Bracket. Harvard Studies in Korean Linguistics 71: 138–152.Google Scholar
Kim, No-Ju 1997 Tones, Segments, and their Interaction in North Kyungsang Korean. Ph. D. dissertation, Ohio State University, Columbus.
Labov, William 1994 Principles of Linguistic Change. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Lee, Ki-Moon 1972 Kwukesa kaysel [History of Korean Language]. Seoul: Tower Press. (First published in 1961.)Google Scholar
Lee, Hyunjung & Allard Jongman 2012 Effects of Tone on the Three-way Laryngeal Distinction in Korean: An Acoustic and Aerodynamic Comparison of the Seoul and South Kyungsang Dialects. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 42.2: 145–169. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, Hyunjung & Jie Zhang 2014 The Nominal Pitch Accent System of South Kyungsang Korean. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 231: 71–111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mikheev, Andrei 1997 Automatic Rule Induction for Unknown-word Guessing. Computational Linguistics 231: 405–423.Google Scholar
Phillips, Betty 1984 Word Frequency and the Actuation of Sound Change. Language 601: 320–342. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Betty 2006 Word Frequency and Lexical Diffusion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
R Development Core Team 2011 R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL].
Ramsey, S. Robert 1978 Accent and Morphology in Korean Dialects. Seoul: Tower Press.Google Scholar
Sohn, Hyang-Sook 2012 Random Patterning in Paradigms of Noun-final Coronal Obstruents: Palatalization, Reanalysis and Analogical Leveling. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 181: 51–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Xu, Yi 2013. Prosody Pro. [URL]
Yang, Charles 2005 On Productivity. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 51: 265–302. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Ito, Chiyuki
2016. Analogical change of accent in the verbal inflection of Yanbian Korean. Lingua 183 ► pp. 34 ff. DOI logo
Kim, Ji Yea
2022. Variation in stem-final consonant clusters in Korean nominal inflection. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7:1 DOI logo
Scheer, Tobias
2019. On the Difference between the Lexicon and Computation (Regarding Slavic Yers). Linguistic Inquiry 50:1 ► pp. 197 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 february 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.