Speaker: Kie Zuraw (UCLA)
Title: Korean sai-siot: phonological and non-phonological factors
Date: Friday, 9/30
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: 32-141
Some Korean compounds are pronounced as though /s/ were inserted,
followed by various automatic rules of the language. A following lenis
obstruent becomes tensified (/twi+s+pa?/ ? [twipa?] back room), and
a following nasal becomes lengthened (/p?+s+nol?/ ? [p?nno??]
sailors song). This phenomenon is known as sai-siot middle s.
Much literature has debated the nature of the sai-siot morpheme, rule,
or constraint (/s/-insertion, mora insertion, etc.), but this talk
focuses on sai-siots distribution.This talk uses corpus data to investigate phonological and other
predictors of sai-siot that have been noted in previous literature, as
well as some new ones. These include the branching structure of
compounds, their etymology (Sino-Korean vs. native Korean), frequency
of the whole compound and its members, syllable counts of compound
members, sonority of the segments surrounding the compound boundary,
and presence of an underlying tense consonant.A recurring finding is that most of these factors interact
quantitatively rather than in a strict hierarchy. For example, its
not the case that compounds can be divided, based on their branching
structure, into those that cant undergo sai-siot and those that may,
depending on other factors. Rather, branching structure and other
factors all contribute to the probability that a compound will undergo
sai-siot. This suggests that phonological and certain non-phonological
factors can interact directly, rather than belonging to completely
separate modules.