A comparative study between French schwa and Korean [i] - An experimental phonetic and phonological perspective -

The aim of this paper is to investigate the acoustic characteristics of the French vowel [e] and Korean [i] and to seek a way of understanding them from a phonological point of view. These two vowels have similar distributional properties, i.e. they alternate with zero in some contexts. Therefore, in both languages, they are not found when immediately followed by a nucleus with phonetic content and in word-final positions. We firstly compare the two vowels by measuring the actual frequencies of the formants, pitch and energy using CSL. We also consider whether the realisation of the two vowels is affected by the speed of speech sounds. In order to show that realisation of the two vowels in both languages is not arbitrary, rather predicted, we will introduce the notion of proper government, proposed and developed by Kaye (1987, 1990) and Charette (1991).