Variation in stem-final consonant clusters in Korean nominal inflection

This study investigates how Korean stem-final consonant clusters /ps/, /ks/, /lk/, and /ls/ exhibit variation, when a vowel-initial inflectional suffix is attached to noun stems. It is well-established that the Korean stem-final consonant clusters are either fully faithfully preserved (i.e. conservative), or simplified by deleting one of the two consonantal elements C1 and C2 (i.e. innovative). However, there has been no study about different degrees of variation across clusters: which consonant cluster is more prone to preservation or simplification. When it comes to simplification, it has also been unclear which of C1 or C2 undergoes deletion, and why. Moreover, little has been known whether different inflectional suffixes have an effect on variation in consonant clusters. Results of a production experiment show that there is a stark dichotomy between the clusters /ps/-/ks/ and /lk/-/ls/, and that the latter (i.e. /lk/ and /ls/) are more prone to simplification. In contrast, there was no significant difference among inflectional suffixes. In addition to examining linguistic factors, sociolinguistic factors were investigated. Speakers’ gender was a significant factor, indicating that males tended to simplify stem-final consonant clusters more frequently than females did. In contrast, there was no regional dialectal difference, unlike claims made in 1980’s, showing that younger speakers of South Kyungsang Korean have assimilated their speech patterns to Seoul Korean speakers’ over the decades. This study is significant, in that it sheds light on a blind spot in the long-lasting discussions of variation of stem-final consonant clusters in Korean, from both linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives.