Japanese/Korean Linguistics

An investigation of 106 Gwangju Korean Sign Language (KSL) toponyms by Ji (2022) describes most names as bimorphemic compounds indexed to the source Korean names, thus loan translations. Roughly a quarter of the KSL names simply represent the initial source morpheme semantics; however, four names represent only the second source morpheme semantics, apparently flouting a constraint for monomorphemic outputs that requires indexing the initial source morpheme semantics. At JK31, two hypotheses were proposed to explain preference for the second morpheme in the KSL toponym: 1) the greater semantic salience of the second source morpheme makes it favored over the initial source morpheme; and 2) an easily assimilated KSL Hangul character sign initialization indexing the initial source morpheme satisfies a general constraint supporting indexing any feature of the initial source morpheme, thus allowing the second morpheme to appear alone while preventing ambiguity. This work examines these two hypotheses.