The Relationship Between Word Frequency and Morphophonological Chage

Abstract

Kim, Youngjoo. 2002. The Relationship Between Word Frequency and Morphophonological Change. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 27-3, 345-377. This paper investigates the effect of word frequency on morphophonological change by comparing verb forms in Old French with those of Modern French. Specifically, I will test whether the irregular high-frequency verbs in Old French experience a regularization procedure(i. e., morphophonological change) less often than do irregular low-frequency verbs. This paper assumes that irregular high-frequency verbs are less affected by morphophonological changes; thus, they remain irregular in Modern French verbs. A correct test requires investigation into the correlation between the frequency of verbs and morphophonological changes in verbs. In section 2 I describe the ways in which the empirical work is done, in particular how the frequency dictionary is formulated. In section 3 I describe the unification of the verb stems in Old French verbs, while in section 4 I compare the frequency of verbs whose stems are unified with that of verbs whose stems are not unified, thus demonstrating the correlation between frequency and morphophonological changes. The evidence suggests that high-frequency verbs resist the morphophonological changes more than low-frequency verbs, with the exception of the case of syllabic alternation. (Kyung Hee University)