Morphological Effects In Loanword Adaptation

Most previous studies related to the input to loanword adaptation have centered on the division between phonological mapping (LaCharité & Paradis, 2005) and perceptual mapping (Silverman 1992). However, few have considered morphological information in loan adaptation. Investigating adaptation of the English plural suffix into Korean by analyzing the corpus data from NIKL (1991), Bae (2002) and Google searches (2010), the present study makes four claims. First, the morphology of a borrowed word should be referred to in calculating sound mappings in loanword adaptation since the same consonant can be adapted differently depending on whether it is morphemic by itself or morpheme-internal. Second, phonetic information of the incoming new word still influences loan adaptation. Different phonetic realization of allomorphs between voiced and voiceless allomorphs determine different rates of vowel epenthesis. Further, adaptation of the allomorphs /ts, dz/ into a single sound in Korean supports this perceptual account. Third, comparison of sound mappings over two decades suggests that sound mappings move toward uniform mappings(Kang 2010).