A synchronic and diachronic analysis of Middle English stress

Yookang Kim 한국음운론학회 2002 음성·음운·형태론 연구 Vol.8 No.1

Kim, Yookang. 2002. A synchronic and diachronic analysis of Middle English stress. Studies in Phonetics. Phonology and Morphology 8.1. 39-63. This paper is a diachronic and synchronic analysis of Middle English stress assignment. Based on Kim's (2001) Old English stress system, I attempt to account for Middle English stress change and the influence of Norman French stress patterns on Middle English. I show that OE main and secondary stress patterns are generally maintained in Middle English with exceptions of the loss of quantity-sensitive secondary stress, the introduction of the Norman French stress rule and stress variations on Norman French prefixed words. These diachronic changes are explained in the Lexical Phonology framework and Kim's OE stress system where main stress and secondary stress are assigned at different prosodic domains. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)

Old English stress: A synchronic analysis with some notes on its diachronic development

YooKang Kim 한국음운론학회 2001 음성·음운·형태론 연구 Vol.7 No.1

Kim, Yookang. 2001. Old English stress: A synchronic analysis with some notes on its diachronic development. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 7./. 21-61. In this paper, I observe that there exists asymmetry between Old English main stress and secondary stress assignment: morphologically-sensitive main stress and phonologically-sensitive secondary stress. In addition, non-uniform features of secondary stress patterns are noted in Old English: quantity-sensitive as well as quantity-insensitive. I claim that these features of Old English stress patterns are well accounted for by separating the prosodic domains of main stress and secondary stress. I propose that main stress is assigned in the domain of the syllable and secondary stress in the domain of the bimoraic foot in Old English. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)

Prosody and Vowel Lengthening in Middle English

Kim Yookang 한국영어학학회 2000 영어학연구 Vol.- No.10

Old English Deverbal Adjectives

Yookang Kim 한국영어학학회 2009 영어학연구 Vol.- No.27

This paper examines the morphological and semantic aspects of the Old English suffix -lic in adjectives deriving from verbal stems(infinitive stems, present and past participle stems). As the deverbal base stems of the adjectives are adjectival in nature, the addition of the suffix -lic to them does not change their word class. Therefore, it seems that the formation of deverbal adjectives by means of -lic suffixation is morphologically redundant. Previous research shows that the suffix imposes the potential meaning of ABLE to its base stem and that the sense of passivity also occurs in some -lic deverbal derivatives(McIntosh 1991, Dalton-Puffer 1997). The results of my corpus-based quantitative study reveal that even though it is true the major meaning of the suffix is the sense of ABLE, the semantic picture of the deverbal suffix -lic is diversified by the existence of several minor meanings as well as by the presence of some instances where the suffix carries no meaning. In addition, I show that the passive meaning is not contributed by the addition of the suffix or by the type of participles but rather it should be seen as a modal implication co-occurring with some lexical meaning of -lic dervatives.

Old English Prefixes: Some Observations on their Base-type, Frequency and Semantic Function

Yookang Kim 한국영어학학회 2012 영어학연구 Vol.18 No.3

Old English prefixation as a means of word-formation has been examined in classical handbooks and journal articles (Campbell 1959, Kastovsky 1992, Quirk and Wrenn 1994, Mitchell and Robinson 2001, Minkova 2008, among others). In spite of their historical information on Old English prefixes, their treatments of this issue are patchy and morphological features of Old English prefixes still require more comprehensive descriptive work. The main goal of this paper is to provide the analysis of Old English prefixes and their morphological characteristics, attempting to answer the following questions, which have not been fully answered in the previous studies: “What prefixes are used in Old English morphology (inventory of Old English prefixes)?”; “What base-words are they combined with (base-type)?”; “How frequently do individual prefixes occur (frequency)?”; “What meaning do they add to the base to which they are attached (semantic function)?”. This article reexamines these questions, expands considerably the empirical data-base for their analysis, and offers a descriptive account of the observed morphological patterns.

Definiteness, Anaphora and Deixis of Old English Demonstratives

Yookang Kim 한국영어학학회 2011 영어학연구 Vol.17 No.3

In Old English, there are two types of demonstratives: se-type and þes-type. According to traditional accounts, the se-type demonstratives are used to carry the sense of ‘the’ or ‘that’ while the other pes-type demonstratives have a deictic role expressing ‘this’. The purpose of this article is to investigate the semantic functions of the OE demonstratives with special attention to their semantic properties of definiteness, anaphora and deixis. Investigating the 545 demonstratives found in Beowulf, and employing three semantic features ([±Def, ±Phoric, ±Deict]) to characterize their semantic roles, this article manifests that the primary role of the OE demonstratives is anaphoric ([+Def, +Phoric, -Deict]) and their deictic function ([+Def, -Phoric, +Deict]) is marginal. This paper concentrates on the following points: Is the semantic opposition of the two types of OE demonstratives clear-cut?; What are the main linguistic roles of the two OE demonstratives? Are they deictic or anaphoric?; Are the OE demonstratives considered to be inherently definite?

A Diachronic Study of English Negative Contraction

Yookang Kim 한국영어학학회 2007 영어학연구 Vol.- No.23

  Previous studies of negative contraction in English have suggested that several factors play a role in the choice of contracted and uncontracted forms: dialectal variations (Levin 1958, Iyeiri 2001, Wood 2002), syntactic conditions (Blockely 1998, 1990), and standard and non-standard varieties (Brainerd 1989). However, the role of prosody has not been considered as one of the main factors influencing contraction. In addition, all of the previous studies mainly focus on a specific period so they do not provide any overall picture of contraction patterns through all the stages either any diachronic comparison of different contraction patterns. The aim of this paper is to investigate negative contraction patterns from Old English to Modern English, demonstrating the role of prosody in the use of contraction. Under the assumption that contraction of two words is most likely to occur when they are prosodically close to each other, I argue that contraction takes place in a nested prosodic word. The generalization of contracted forms in Modern English is seen as the result of a phonological drift of prosodic structure which is most appropriate for contraction.

Syllabic consonants in Early English

Yookang Kim(김유강) 한국음운론학회 2006 음성·음운·형태론 연구 Vol.12 No.2

Under the traditional assumption that syllabic consonants are phonetic realizations of the underlying /?C/ (Wells 1995) and that schwa is not fully specified at the segmental and prosodic levels (Kehoe and Lle? 2003, van Oostendorp 1995, 1998, 2000), I attempt to provide a diachronic account of syllabic consonants and their phonetic counterparts [VC] from Proto-Indo-European to Middle English. I argue that the interaction between segmental features ([+place] and [+syllabic]) and a prosodic unit (mora) plays a decisive role in the phonetic realizations of /?C/ (cf. Lipski 1993). Specifically, the underlying /?C/ is phonetically realized as a syllabic consonant or a vowel plus a non-syllabic consonant by the operations (delinking and spreading) of two features, [+syllabic] and [+place]. Although details vary depending on the periods, the formation of syllabic consonants and their alternative phonetic forms [VC] from PIE to ME results from phonological feature reassignments.

Semantic Conditions on Prefix Order in Old English

Yookang Kim 한국영어학학회 2013 영어학연구 Vol.19 No.2

In Old English, prefixation can occur recursively, producing a variety of double prefixes (e.g., blinn > a+blinn > un+a+blin 'irrepressible state'). Despite the frequent occurrences of the recursive formation of prefixes, the issues concerning their formation, frequency, and semantic features have not been intensively examined yet and its research history is patchy at best (cf. Minkova 2008). This article investigates various combinations of double prefixes and attempts to offer an account of their morphological and semantic patterns. Overall, 67 combinations of double prefixes and 843 words beginning with double prefixes have been identified and their linguistic patterns have been analyzed. The results of this study reveal that there are significant tendencies involving double prefixation, which are closely related with the semantic change (fading) of prefixes in grammaticalization: double prefixation favors two prefixes standing at both ends of the continuum of semantic fading; the more a prefix has been semantically faded, the more frequent it is in the right position of double prefixes. Therefore, it can be seen that prefix combinations in Old English are constrained by semantic factors.

A Corpus-based Analysis of Old English -lic and -lice

Yookang Kim 한국영어학학회 2008 영어학연구 Vol.- No.25

  The aim of this paper is to provide a statistical analysis of morphological patterns of the Old English adjectival suffix -lic and adverbial suffix -lice. Although the synchronic function of the endings has been noted by scholars (Donner 1991, Swan 1998, McIntosh 1991) and a few attempts have been made to account for the diachronic evolution of the suffixes into Modern English (Ciszek 2002, Nevalainen 1994, 1997), a general picture of their morphological patterns in Old English has not been given proper attention. Put differently, the issues concerning the extent to which the Old English suffixes are productive and to what base categories they are attached have been left unexplored. Therefore, any generalizations concerning the morphological patterns of the endings have not been captured. Surveying 892 stems combined with the suffixes and their 26,622 tokens collected from the machine readable corpus The Dictionary of Old English Corpus, this article attempts to provide a comprehensive analysis of the morphological behaviors of the OE affixes. The main results of this statistical study give proper understanding of morphological aspects of the suffixes which have not been precisely described in traditional historical handbooks.