KOREAN MORPHOLOGY · SURFACES

Contractions and zero surfaces

Contractions

보아→봐, 주어→줘, and 되어→돼 combine a stem-final vowel with the 아/어 family. The shorter surface form retains stem and ending provenance.

No syllable is generated from phonetic similarity outside the permitted combination table.

v:보다 matches 봐 under inflection. lit:보다 performs no morphological assembly and therefore does not match the same source 봐.

Zero surfaces

Some source analyses contain grammatical nodes without independent surface spans. A zero surface explains the relationship between adjacent components and creates no new search span.

A query core cannot be satisfied only by zero surfaces. It requires an observable anchor and non-empty core.

Span preservation

A contracted core span points to actual source syllables, while its origins point to pre-assembly morpheme paths. An atom token span may include consumed following endings.

Normalized matches in NFD source are mapped back to original code-unit ranges.