Accent classes in South Kyengsang Korean: Lexical drift, novel words and loanwords

Abstract

This paper examines changes in the accent class affiliation of c. 1900 words from Middle Korean into the modern South Kyengsang dialect. The data present the profile of a canonical analogical change: words are attracted to larger lexical classes and words of lower token frequency are more likely to change their affiliation. Several properties of the syllable onset and coda as well as syllable weight are shown to bias a word to particular accent classes. A novel word experiment suggests that speakers have tacit knowledge of some of these phonological biases but not others. The paper considers whether these biases can explain the default accent assigned to English loanwords and whether they can be modeled with weighted constraints in a Maxent grammar.