Dissertation - Michael Becker

at a time (which grows linearly with the number of surface forms) is sufficient for findingone form that can serve as the UR.In some cases, however, the UR of the affix cannot be simply one of its surface forms, asin the Korean accusative (173), taken from Albright (2008), and discussed in fuller detailin §4.4.2. Word-finally, the only coronal obstruent that Korean allows is an unreleasedvoiceless unaspirate dental. Upon the addition of a vowel-initial suffix, if an aspirated stopemerges, it can either be dental or pre-palatal.(173) Bare noun Accusativenat^ nat h -1l ‘piece’nat^ naÙ h -1l ‘face’Given the assumption that the two roots in (173) are underlyingly identical to their baseform, i.e. /nat^/, taking the surface form of the accusative suffix as its UR cannot derivethe different observed forms, as shown in (174), where the winner [naÙ h -1l] is harmonicallybounded.(174)/nat^/ + /1l/ IDENT(asp) IDENT(anterior) IDENT(voice)a. nat h -1l ≻ nad-1l L Wb. naÙ h -1l ≻ nat h -1l LTo find out what needs to be changed about the UR of the affix, the learner can comparethe intended winner [naÙ h -1l] to the current winner [nat h -1l], given their current hypothesisabout the UR of [naÙ h -1l].This is shown in (174b), and it reveals that the accusativeinvolves a change of the feature [anterior], and prompts the speaker to add [anterior] asa floating feature to the affix.181