Diachronic study of Korean vowel elision: focusing on inflectional affixation

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The aim of this paper is to examine the data showing vowel elision phenomena and provide a consistent and comprehensive analysis in the framework of constraints and their ranking. In V1+V2 sequence where an inflectional affix is adjacent to a stem ending in a vowel at a morpheme boundary, either vowel is elided to avoid vowel clash. In Mid-Korean, vowel elision is optional, thus multiple output forms take place. However, later that era, vowel elision becomes unexceptionally obligatory, thus optionality disappears. Such different aspects between two historical eras are due to ranking change. For the former, surface multiplicity emerges since two reversible constraints, Uniformity IO and Onset, are satisfied at the same time. Under reversibility, ranking variants of two adjacent constraints are responsible for emergence of surface multiplicity. For the latter, the ranking change from reversible to fixed renders only a single output form. Optionality is not expected. Further, the ranking change of different historical times affects the asymmetric vowel elision in Modern Korean as well. Some involve surface multiplicity while others do not. As such, diachronic change of vowel elision reflects constraints and their ranking change of different historical eras.

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