Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Phonology Circle 2/29 — Youngah Do and Michael Kenstowicz

The Phonology Circle will meet on Wednesday this semester, from 5–7 (except when otherwise announced).
This week’s meeting with feature a talk by Youngah Do and Michael Kenstowicz.

Title: Kyungsang Korean Accent Patterns: Lexical Drift, Loanwords, Novel Words
Date: Feb. 29 (W)
Time: 5:00–7:00
Location: 32D831

South Kyungsang is a pitch accent language with three lexically contrastive tonal patterns for monosyllabic nouns and four patterns for di- and tri-syllables. Our Phonology Circle presentation of last fall (10/26) focused on deviations from the etymologically expected accent class based on a word’s attested accent in Middle Korean. We showed that words are attracted to the statistically more frequent class and that this lexical drift tends to affect less frequent words (a common trait of analogical change Phillips 1984). Our data also indicated that sonorant codas, syllable weight, and the presence of fortis or aspirated consonants bias a word towards a particular accent class. In this presentation we show that these factors also emerge in a novel word experiment. We also present results of elicitations from 13 speakers designed to track the correlation between the well-known T > s analogy in the infection of nouns and the substitution of the High-High tonal pattern in place of the etymologically expected High-Low. We invite suggestions on the proper statistical measures to evaluate and present our results.