The Morphology and Syntax workshop will meet this Friday, April 21st, from 12:30pm to 2:30pm in Cobb 304. Jaehong Shim will present his research on the Korean subjective honorific. The title and abstract are below.
Title: A Distributed Morphology approach to historical difference in the sequence of Korean subjective honorific suffix –si
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to analyze the different distribution of Korean subjective honorific (SH) suffix –si between Middle Korean (MK) and Modern Korean (K) in the Distributed Morphological (DM) point of view.
In Korean, SH indicates that the subject or the possessor of the subject is an honorified NP. The honorified NP, base-generated in Spec vP, moves to Spec TP and Spec CP. During the movement, the honorified NP triggers insertion of SH as a dissociated morpheme to v head (node-sprouting, Choi & Harley 2019). Due to the cyclic nature of node-sprouting, multiple SH marking is also possible if more than one v head is c-commanded by the honorified NP in derivation, e.g. long-form negation (Choi & Harley: 1338-1340).
In Modern Korean, SH is inserted right after the predicate stem (Sohn 2001: 233). However, in Middle Korean, unlike Modern Korean, other morphemes can intervene between the predicate stem and SH. This is intriguing since, as Baker (1985) pointed out, morphological differences may represent syntactic differences between two varieties.
I propose that the ordering difference should be explained in two aspects: first, change in the tense-aspect (TA) system and second, change in the node-sprouting rule itself.
First, for the change in the TA system, the semantic difference regarding –te is crucial. While it is considered as a past sensory evidential suffix in Modern Korean (Song 2002), the same morpheme is considered as an imperfective morpheme in Middle Korean (Choe 2015). This fact suggests that the morpheme –te has different functional projections in K and MK: EVIDP and ASPP respectively.
Second, for the claim that the node-sprouting rule in Middle Korean is different from Modern Korean, I propose the following node-sprouting rule for Middle Korean:
ASP → [ASP HON]/[NP[+hon] ... [ ... ... ]
If this claim is true, Local Allomorph Selection Theorem (Choi & Harley 2019) predicts that a suppletive pattern of the triply-suppletive verb √EXIST different from Modern Korean would emerge when honorification co-occurs with short-form negation. Middle Korean data show that this is the right prediction.
Our schedule for the remainder of the quarter is as follows:
W8 (5/12): Laura Stigliano (UChicago)
W9 (5/19): Claire Halpert (University of Minnesota)