Gradient vowel cooccurrence restrictions in monomorphemic native Korean roots
Sung‐Hoon Hong · 2010
This paper presents evidence for gradient vowel cooccurrence restrictions holding in the monomorphemic roots of the native Korean words. Noting that vowel cooccurrence often emerges as a result of vowel harmony and vowel harmony was once active in Korean, I examine root-internal vowels to see if they conform to the general patterns of the vowel harmony. For this examination, I extract multisyllable words registered as monomorphemic and native in Pyo-jun-gug-eo-dai-sa-jeon (The National Institute of the Korean Language, 2001). I then measure the degree to which vowels occur together utilizing the metric of O/E, the observed frequency divided by the expected frequency (Pierrehumbert 1993). The O/E values obtained between two vowels in the first three syllables of the multisyllable words are compared to the possible and impossible patterns of the vowel harmony. The results show that although not absolute, vowel cooccurrence restrictions similar to those enforced by the vowel harmony hold in a gradient manner within a monomorphemic native root in Korean.