The base of Korean noun paradigms: Evidence from tone

Abstract

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.