Learnability of Morpheme-Specific Grammar: Implications of Irregular Stems in Korean
박창범 · Studies in Linguistics · 2009
The purpose of this study is to show how a language learner acquires morpheme-specific grammar within a framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1995). Korean has some eccentric morphemes that undergo an idiosyncratic process in certain environment, which other morphemes fail. This study focuses on three types of morphemes, namely irregular /s/, /t/, and /p/ ending stems, which undergo deletion, lateralization, and vocalization, respectively. In order to clarify the learning procedure of the process, two learning theories, Recursive Constraint Demotion algorithm (Tesar & Smolensky 1998, 2000) and Inconsistency Resolution Routine (Pater 2007, 2009) are employed in this paper. In addition, integrated analysis of the phenomenon is also provided.