A morphosyntactic haplology of -i drop in the Korean vocatives

Abstract

Abstract An intriguing phenomenon in Korean vocative constructions has not received comprehensive attention in the generative literature: in the vocatives, the morpheme -i undergoes drop, and its absence hinges on its immediate adjacency to the vocative marker -(y)a. This article contributes to the literature by demonstrating that this drop is an instance of morphosyntactic haplological dissimilation. Specifically, I identify two ϕ-features, ϕ[−HON: intimate] and ϕ[animate], and propose the morphosyntactic *<ϕ,ϕ> constraint on the -i drop, targeting adjacent matching ϕ-features. This constraint rules out the illicit sequence of *-i-(y)a because both morphemes share matching ϕ-features and their exponents are immediately string-adjacent, resulting in the -i drop. This analysis offers theoretical insights into the mechanisms underlying the haplological dissimilation pertaining to ϕ-features.