Dissertation - Michael Becker

(196) Bare noun Accusative Nominativenat^ nas1l naSi ‘sickle’nat^ naÙ h 1l naÙ h i ‘face’nat^ nat h 1l naÙ h i ‘piece’nat^ naÃ1l naÃi ‘daytime’nat^ nad1l naÃi ‘grain’Korean also has two suffixes that surface as [-e]: the locative and the dative. Kang(2002) shows that the mapping of /t^/ to [s] is more frequent for the nominative andaccusative than it is for the locative and dative.In other words, the affixes that don’thave a high vowel in them are less conducive to assibilation. In my analysis, the suffixesthat have a high vowel can cause assibilation simply by virtue of having a high segmentin their surface form.The suffixes that have a non-high vowel, in contrast, can onlycause assibilation if the learner adds a floating [−continuant] feature to their underlyingrepresentation. While this difference doesn’t necessarily have to correspond to frequencydata, since assibilation is equally possible with any suffix once a floating feature is added tosuffixes that lack a high vowel, it is instructive that speakers are more reluctant to assibilatein the environment where assibilation requires an extra learning step of adding a floatingfeature to the UR.In addition, Albright (2008) reports that while speakers most commonly innovate themapping of /t^/ to [s] and [Ù h ] in the accusative, they prefer the mapping to [t h ] in thelocative. Albright suggests that the preference for [t h ] is a result of the accidentally highnumber of nouns that historically had [t h ] and that are frequently used in the locative, suchas the words for field and corner. Since in my analysis, lexical trends are computed for eachaffix individually, accidentally skewed distributions can be learned: If more items happento require the ranking of *TI over IDENT(cont) in the accusative than in the locative, thenthe probability of mapping /t^/ to [s] will be higher in the accusative.203