On the alternation of the modesty suffix in Middle Korean

Abstract

This paper reanalyzes the phonological alternation of the 15 th century Middle Korean pre-final modesty suffix showing the various alternating forms, - s? p-,-z? p-, -c? p-,-s? β-, -z? β-, -c? β-,-s?m-, -z?m-, -c?m-, s’? β-, -z’? β-, -c’? β-, etc. As this suffix is no longer used in Modern Korean, there have been very few accounts on the phonological variations, compared with those on syntactic characteristics (H.-K. Kim 1947, Heo 1953, B.-H. Ahn 1961, C.-W. Park 1996, Y.-P. Kim 2002, etc.). There remains, however, a controversy over the underlying representation of this suffix in that those two segments /?/ and /β/ are extinct in the Modern Korean phonemic inventory. Based on this historical background, this paper attempts to analyze the phonological nature of this suffix from a new perspective. To this end, we propose an underspecified feature geometric representation of this pre-final suffix, reflecting the ambivalence of the initial and the final consonants. And this proposal for the underspecified representation is supported by various alternating forms. Finally, we conclude this paper by illustrating how the Middle Korean form has been changed to the Early Modern Korean variants in terms of the constraint ranking relationship and the change of hierarchy. Here we employ the combination tableau format (McCarthy 2008) in order to show the clear ranking relationship among the constraints.