Truncation in Message-Oriented Phonology: A case study using Korean vocative

1 This paper analyzes the vocative truncation pattern in Korean from the viewpoint ofMessage2 Oriented Phonology (MOP: Hall et al. 2016), which capitalizes on the idea that sound patterns 3 are governed by a principle that makes message transfer effective. In the traditional naming 4 pattern, Korean first names consist of a generation marker and a unique portion, and the or5 der between these two elements alternates between generations. To derive vocative forms, the 6 generation marker is truncated, and the suffixal [(j)a] is attached to the unique portion. We 7 argue that MOP naturally predicts this type of truncation. As the generation marker is shared 8 by all the members of the same generation, the generation marker is highly predictable and 9 hence does not reduce uncertainty about the intended message. To achieve effective com10 munication, predictable portions are deleted. To the extent that our analysis is on the right 11 track, it implies that MOP is relevant not only to phonetic implementation patterns, but also to 12 (morpho-)phonological patterns. It also provides support to MOP based on data from a non13 Indo-European language. Finally, we aim to integrate insights of MOP with a more formal 14 proposal like Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 2004), by relating the predictability of 15 a contrast to the ranking of the faithfulness constraint that it protects, following the spirit of 16 the P-map hypothesis (Steriade, 2001/2008). 17