음성음운형태론연구 19집 2호 박선우, 홍성훈, 변균혁
박선우, 홍성훈, 변균혁. 2013. 한국어의 어휘계층과 음운론적 복잡성. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and
Morphology 19.2. 255-274.
This paper explores the structure of the Korean lexicon-based on the notion of "Phonological Complexity (PC)." The Korean lexicon is composed of three lexical strata: native and Sino-Korean words, and loanwords. For
this study, we obtain 500 most frequent nouns for each class from the word list
compiled by Kang and Kim (2004). We then calculate the PC values of the selected
nouns using the bigram model proposed by Goldsmith (2002). A comparison of the
PC values reveals that the average PC value is highest for loanwords, and lowest for
Sino-Korean. The average PC value of native nouns is placed in the middle, and in
fact, the PC values of native vocabulary are distributed widely from low to high
values. The distribution of native nouns is in contrast with the distributions of
loanwords and Sino-Korean, which are biased toward high and low PC values,
respectively. Considering the relation between PC and markedness, we assert that
Sino-Korean vocabulary is clustered around the unmarked portion of the lexicon,
while loanwords are predominantly placed in the marked portion of the lexicon.
Native vocabulary, on the other hand, is distributed in both marked and unmarked
parts of the lexicon. (Hanshin University and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)