Abstract
Korean shows variable /n/-insertion between a morpheme-final consonant and the initial /i/ or /j/ of a following morpheme. Literature has shown that the appearance of the phenomenon can be affected by various parameters, including social and phonological factors. Exemplar theory contends that a word’s susceptibility to language variation correlates directly with its word frequency, a unitary frequency measure based on a corpus (Pierrehumbert 2001; Bybee 2002). However, given that individuals have different language experience, word frequency rarely addresses individual differences in the same way that self-rated measures of word frequency, known as subjective lexical familiarity, do. This research investigates whether and how the metric of self-rated lexical familiarity affects Korean /n/-insertion. Results indicate that subjective lexical familiarity significantly predicts the appearance of /n/-insertion, such that words more familiar to the speaker show /n/-insertion more often than those that are less familiar.
Highlights
In Korean, /n/-insertion appears variably when a first morpheme is consonantfinal and a second morpheme begins with a high front vocoid, /i/ or /j/
We find evidence to suggest that subjective lexical familiarity (SLF) takes into account morpho-phonological strategies that are reflective of both language-level frequency and individual-level frequency
This research has found a main effect of SLF on /n/-insertion and provided evidence to suggest that SLF may be a more comprehensive metric of frequency in studies of variation and language change
Summary
In Korean, /n/-insertion appears variably when a first morpheme is consonantfinal and a second morpheme begins with a high front vocoid, /i/ or /j/. This research aims to investigate the conditioning effect of seven social, phonological and historical factors on /n/-insertion, including the novel variable of subjective lexical familiarity (SLF). Korean shows /n/-insertion at the juncture of two morphemes comprising a compound (1a), a derivational word (1b), or a syntactic phrase (1c), especially when the first morpheme ends in a consonant (C1) and the second morpheme begins with a vocoid, the high front vowel /i/ or the glide /j/, as in (1)
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