The Origins of /h/-Final Nouns in Middle Korean

Kim, Taewoo

doi:10.30961/lr.2023.59.3.271

Lang. Res. 59(3):271-291

pISSN: 0254-4474, eISSN: 2586-7113

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30961/lr.2023.59.3.271

Article

The Origins of /h/-Final Nouns in Middle Korean

Taewoo Kim ¹ ^, ^†

Author Information & Copyright ▼

¹Pusan National University

^†Corresponding Author: Assistant Professor Department of Korean Language and Literature Pusan National University 2, Busandaehak-ro 63 beon-gil, Geumjeong-gu, Busan 46241, Korea E-mail: twkim@pusan.ac.kr

ⓒ Copyright 2023 Language Education Institute, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Oct 31, 2023 ; Revised: Dec 13, 2023 ; Accepted: Dec 28, 2023

Published Online: Dec 31, 2023

ABSTRACT

The investigation of lexical asymmetries and exceptions serves as the basis for internal reconstruction and provides an insight into the development of the current synchronic state. This study investigates the unique phonological patterns and semantics of /h/-final nouns in Middle Korean. From a phonological perspective, they show a tone pattern that does not align with nouns ending in an obstruent but aligns with those ending in a vowel or a sonorant. This suggests that the stem-final /h/ might have been absent at some point. From a semantic perspective, spatial and temporal nouns are disproportionately represented within /h/-final nouns. Finally, the concatenation of a spatial or temporal noun with a locative suffix typically forms a single linguistic unit. This study integrates these phonological, morphological, and semantic observations and proposes that the stem-final /h/ observed in some /h/-final nouns originated from a reanalysis of the initial consonant of the locative suffix *kuy.

Keywords: Middle Korean; /h/-final nouns; internal reconstruction; locative; reanalysis; lexicalization

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