Preface
前言

Although many studies have been done on the subject of lexical diffusion in a number of different languages since the introduction of the theory by William S-Y. Wang in the late nineteen sixties, there was no in-depth analysis of lexical diffusion specifically dealing with Korean. Although the theory has been well known in Korean historical linguistics circles, and many Korean historical phonologists have accepted it in spirit and referred to it in their articles and books, the theory has never been proven to be viable in a hard analysis. This monograph is an attempt to fill that gap that has long existed in Korean historical linguistics.

The work presented here was made possible through the Korea Research Foundation's grant for 'Joint Research with Distinguished Scholars'. Professors Sang-Oak Lee (Principal Investigator), Hyung-Soo Kim(Co-researcher), and Ik-sang Eom(Co-researcher) each has done the research individually in consultation with Professor William S-Y. Wang under the project title of 'The Lexical Diffusion of Sound Change in Korean and Sino-Korean'. Although the three researchers operated independently with their own research topics, they all had the aim of applying Wang's theory of lexical diffusion to the analysis of sound change in Korean.

Sang-Oak Lee's article, 'An Analysis of Lexical Diffusion in Korean' has looked into the types of changes that have occurred in 158 adverbial forms from the 15th century, which is the time when the Korean Alphabet was invented, to the late 19th century. The adverbials had been singled out for his research because this category is free of inflection, which ensures lack of any paradigmatic influences such as leveling and analogy. The work had to deal with 408 Korean historical texts spanning around 450 years, a daunting task by itself. The article shows some of these rules in tabular forms. Among these, vowel shortening most clearly has shown the gradual spread of a phonological rule by lexical diffusion. Lee in conclusion has proposed positing the variant form (marked as V) at an intermediate stage in lexical diffusion.

Hyung-Soo Kim's article, 'The Lexical and Phonological Diffusion of Umlaut in Korean Dialects' has analyzed how the phonological process of umlaut has spread itself among Korean dialects, using the ten-volume dialect dictionary, 'Hankwuk Pangen Caryocip', as the data source. Kim has calculated the degree of umlaut among 9 South Korean dialects with regard to the five [+back] vowels that are fronted by i or y in the following syllable and has found that in addition to the random spread predicted by the principle of lexical diffusion, there is also systematic orderly spread of umlaut among the target vowels. Kim interprets this result as an example of phonological diffusion first proposed by Matthew Chen. The analysis of Korean umlaut shows that this phonological diffusion can occur not only through extension of the rule's environment as Chen and Wang envisioned but also as a result of incorporating a larger group of phonological elements under the rule's domain.

While the first two articles deal with sound changes in indigenous Korean, the third article by Ik-sang Eom deals with palatalization of Sino-Korean, Korean pronunciation of Chinese characters. Palatalization of Middle Chinese retroflex stop and alveolar stop initials in Sino-Korean (*t-, *t- > c-) has been known as one of the most peculiar changes in Sino-Korean initials because these initials underwent different changes in Chinese. Through a thorough observation of the mechanism of Sino-Korean palatalization from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, Eom concludes that Sino-Korean palatalization was an internal change within Korean and diffused across the Sino-Korean lexicon in a gradual manner for centuries. The results thus support the lexical diffusion model of sound change.

It is hoped that this monograph will not only contribute to a further understanding of the theory of lexical diffusion but the three articles in their own way will provide an opportunity to re-examine it in light of their new findings in Korean. If nothing else, we believe that the works are valuable in showing the ways of processing enormous amount of Korean and Sino-Korean data on the computer. We thank Professor Wang for recommending the work to be published in the Journal of Chinese Linguistics monograph series as well as the Korea Research Foundation for all the support given to the project.

September 20, 2003
Sang-Oak Lee
Hyung-Soo Kim
Ik-sang Eom