This paper puts forward an optimality-theoretic explanation for the structure-dependence of synchronic variation and diachronic change. The approach is illustrated by modelling two well-documented phonological changes in detail. The model combines invariant regularities, variable regularities and statistical preferences in a seamless fashion by means of partially ordered constraint sets. Diachronic change is visualized in terms of grammar lattices (inventories of possible grammars) induced by universal and language-particular rankings.

The use of honorifics in Korean and Japanese is generally dictated by social factors such as age, status, and gender (Sohn 1999, Kuno 1987). Honorifics are marked by a well-defined repertoire of linguistic elements, including address-terms, specialized vocabulary, and verbal suffixes. Depending on the relationship between the interlocutors, an honorific form is chosen over the other available forms. Recently, researchers have been questioning whether the choice is wholly dependent on the relative status, or if other factors play a role in the selection process (Strauss and Eun 2005, Dunn 2005, Yoon 2015). This study focuses on the honorifics productively encoded by verbal suffixes. Unexpectedly, continual shifts between verbal suffixes are observed in a single speech situation. Based on the analyses of media data, we identify a set of social meanings encoded by these shifts. Furthermore, we show that Silverstein’s notion of “indexical order” (Silverstein 2003) is crucial for accounting for suffix alternation.

This study examines the nominal address terms in Korean and Japanese and argues that the notion of 'Intimacy' plays a crucial role in choosing an appropriate nominal address term in both languages. In the past several decades, a long list of researchers working in diverse languages have evaluated the validity of the Power and Solidarity semantics proposed by Brown and Gilman (1960), which provided a ground-breaking framework to account for the selection of pronominal address terms in the T-V languages. Building on the Power and Solidarity semantics, we propose to fine-tune it by adding Intimacy as the third dimension crisscrossing the first two well-established dimensions. We take Power and Solidarity as socially prescribed notions while Intimacy is personally defined. We demonstrate how this highly subjective notion dictates and often manipulates the ways the Korean/Japanese speaker selects an appropriate nominal address term. In particular, we argue that the Korean selection of pseudo-kinship terms over the neutral title ssi, or the Japanese use of chan/kun by adult speakers in lieu of the default 'Last Name+san' , cannot be accounted for without applying Intimacy as a crucial indexing device. Furthermore, we suggest that Intimacy is not an ad hoc dimension specific to Korean and Japanese, but that it is relevant to all languages whether or not a given language has an overt way of encoding it.

Korean and Japanese are typical classifier languages that classify a noun based on the semantic type of its referent with a counter word when plurality is involved. Their plural marking appears to be optional when the noun denotes general plurality, but obligatory when a noun is marked by the semantic feature, [+specific] (Ioni, Ko & Wexler, 2004). In this study, we characterize the so-called ‘optional’ plurality in Korean and Japanese as the manifestation of the grammaticalization. Drawing on actual data, we demonstrate that the plural suffix is increasingly used as a neutral plural marker. The grammaticalization is more prevalent when the nouns are higher in the Animacy Hierarchy (e.g., Comrie, 1989), although there are differences in acceptability between Korean and Japanese. We attribute the differences to the language-specific uses of the plural suffix, namely, Japanese associative reading and Korean event-plural reading (Song, 1997).

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