The Accent of Sino-Korean Words in South Kyengsang Korean

Abstract

Most of the Sino-Korean readings that are attested in Middle Korean (15–16th c.) and are prevalent in contemporary Korean are assumed to have been introduced into Korean from Middle Chinese. Previous literature has reported that even in contemporary Korean dialects with distinctive tonal contrasts, the tonal patterns of Sino-Korean morphemes show regular correspondences with Middle Chinese tones to a certain extent. In this paper, we investigate the accentuation of Sino-Korean words in the South Kyengsang dialect with a comparison of native simplex nouns on the one hand and with Middle Korean accent on the other. The Sino-Korean nouns in South Kyengsang display the same range of accentual contrasts as native simplex nouns, but type frequency differs between the two lexical classes, which leads to distinct default accent classes. There are correlations between segmental type (onset and coda) and accent class in both Middle Korean and South Kyengsang Sino-Korean words, some of which are emergent patterns in the latter. We conclude that the Sino-Korean accent, while being faithful to the historically expected accent as a rule, has frequently been restructured through analogical changes based on four factors: (i) a simple type-frequency effect attracting many words to a default accent class, (ii) identical isolation forms resulting in an ambiguous accentual contrast, (iii) local generalizations based on segment−tone correlations with higher type frequency in the lexicon, and (iv) phonetically natural associations.