Speaker: Young Ah Do (MIT)
Title: Foreignness, Word Structure and Lexical Stratum
Time: Monday 10/25, 5pm, 32-D831
In many languages, loanwords undergo a different set of phonological rules from native items: loanwords sometimes allow a subset of the structures present in native phonology (Kenstowicz 2005), they might allow a superset (Inkelas, Orgun, and Zoll 1997) or two can be disjunctive (Jurgec 2009). All such phenomena could be due to (a) unfamiliarity of loanwords or (b) formal marking as a member of distinctive lexical stratum.
I support hypothesis (b), showing a Korean case in which phonological behavior of loanwords and native items with similar frequency behave differently: loanwords are more resistant to alternations. Interestingly, a lexical strata effect is found only from morphologically complex words: foreign compounds resist native alternations, but lexicalized monomorphemic items don’t (e.g. ‘sun light’ ? [s?n lait] vs. ‘lonely’ ? [lolli]). To analyze this result, I separate indexed Faithfulness constraints (Itô and Mester 1995, Pater 2000) into two components—Input-Output and Output-Output correspondence constraints.
In some cases, however, compounds participate in native alternations; (1) when native inflectional suffix is added (e.g. ‘sun light-i(nom)’ ? s?l lais-i) and (2) when a native morpheme is at the right edge of compound (e.g. back madang ‘yard’ ? ba? mada? vs. c?k ‘red’ napkin ? c?k nap?kin). Assuming that (1) an inflectional suffix is head of the word and (2) Korean posits head of compound at the right edge of the word, I argue the head is always relevant in determining the stratal behavior. Notably, the only constraints where head makes a difference are OO-F constraints, so processes are free to apply within foreign monomorphemic words.
Upcoming talks:
Nov 1: Sverre Stausland Johnsen (Harvard)
Nov 8: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Potsdam)
Nov 15: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks
Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)
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