The Lexical and Phonological Diffusion of Umlaut in Korean Dialects
韩国方言中的前高元音逆同化词汇音韵扩散
Hyung-Soo Kim 金烱秀

Abstract 摘要
In this research, I analyze how umlaut has diffused itself across Korean dialects, using the ten-volume Hankwuk Pangen Caryocip (A Corpus Dictionary of Korean dialects) as the database. Following the theory of lexical diffusion developed over the years in Wang (1969), Chen (1977), Chen and Wang (1975), and Wang and Lien (1993), I first show that application of umlaut in Korean dialects is not regular in the Neogrammarian sense, admitting many exceptions. I then turn to the five [+back] vowels that are fronted by i or y in the following syllable. These target vowels show great dialectal variation in their degree of umlaut, which I have tabulated to see if we can find some measure of regularity. It turns out that this variation in application of umlaut is not random: the vowel a consistently shows the highest rate across dialects, while the vowel u generally shows a low rate of application. This result is then interpreted under the purview of the so-called phonological diffusion proposed by Chen (1977), who, viewing phonological change as a rule schema that gradually expands its scope by extending its environment, has called for future research into the phenomenon. The application of umlaut in Korean shows that this phonological diffusion occurs through extension not only of the rule's environment but also of its elements.

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