Paradigm Leveling in American Korean

This study examines a simplified version of the Korean language spoken by the Korean-American 'heritage' speakers in America, which is dubbed American Korean (AK) in this paper. This paper focuses on the elimination of morphophonemic alternation, i.e., a case of paradigm leveling, in the conjugation of irregular verbs of Korean. It is argued that the morphological change has been triggered by the speakers' sociolinguistically biased exposure to the pragmatic system of speech level marking of Korean and that as a consequence, the verbs of American Korean have all been re-parsed as free, vowel-final morphemes.