Kim, Ji Yea. 2022. The Korean innovative suffix -lʌ: Indirect affix borrowing and morphological copy epenthesis. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 28.1. 57-82. This paper shows that the Korean innovative suffix -lʌ, as in sʌul-lʌ ‘a person from Seoul, a person who resides in Seoul’ and tɨŋsan-lʌ ‘a person who climbs mountains,’ originates from the English “demonym” suffix -er, as an extension of Kim and Repetti (2021). It also proposes that the suffix -lʌ was borrowed into Korean via indirect affix borrowing, adopting Seifart’s (2015) criteria. As for the quality of the onset consonant in -lʌ, this study provides a lexical frequency-based copy epenthetic analysis: /l/ is copied from the final consonant of the frequent Korean place name sʌul ‘Seoul.’ This paper proposes that the usage of -lʌ as a demonym suffix in the frequent derivative sʌul-lʌ may have been extended to the usage of an agentive suffix denoting ‘a person who does X,’ resulting in a syncretism. There are mainly two pieces of evidence for this: lexical frequency and chronology. Lastly, this paper demonstrates that consonant copy epenthesis lacks phonological motivation since it creates a phonologically marked structure, a coda. I instead argue that epenthesis is motivated by morphology in order to achieve stem-syllable alignment. (Stony Brook University, PhD Candidate)

Keywords: indirect affix borrowing, morphological copy epenthesis, syncretism, demonym suffix, agentive suffix, Korean, English

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