• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.185-205
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• 2002

Within the framework of Generalized Sympathy (GS) (Jun 1999), this paper investigates the reasons why phonological rules such as Cluster Simplification, Closed Syllable ${\ae}$-Tensing, and Belfast Dentalization overapply or underapply in Class 2 affixed words in English. According to GS, a morphologically independent word can be treated as a derived word in that it is assumed to have any possible outputs as bases to resemble. As a result, a correspondence relation is triggered between a morphologically independent word being represented as Derived (D) and any possible outputs represented as Base (B), i.e., BD-Faith. In analyses of affixed words, BA-Faith is evoked, instead of BD-Faith. Furthermore, as Benua (1997) suggests, BA-Faith is classified into two correspondence relations; $BA_1$-Faith between Base and Class 1 affixed words, and $BA_2$-Faith between Base and Class 2 affixed words. When the $BA_1$-Faith takes precedence over phonological constraints three rules misapply in Class 2 affixed words. In other words, the misapplications are driven by base-identity effects.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.27-40
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• 2000

The goal of quantitative linguistics is to show the quantitative behavior of linguistic units. There are several studies which examine the frequency of Korean phonemes, which are important in comprehending the internal function of the linguistic units. However, the frequency information, from the pure phonological level without any consideration of rhythmic group, cannot adequately represent linguistic phenomena. Therefore, to provide the effective information, the phonological transcription must be carried out on the level of rhythmic group. In this paper, we made the transcription to analyze Korean phonology. We were not satisfied with merely investigating the frequencies of the phonemes, but also examined whether the distribution of Korean phonemes show the binomial distribution within linguistic constraints.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.365-365
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• 2000

English segments adopted into Korean can be divided into three types: Some English segments /$m, {\;}n, {\;}{\eta}, {\;}p^h, {\;}t^h, {\;}k^h$/ are adopted into the original sound [$m, {\;}n, {\;}{\eta}, {\;}p^h, {\;}t^h, {\;}k^h$] in Korean. Other segments /b, d, g/ appear in the voiceless stop form [p, t, k]. Generative Phonology explains the presence of the above English segments in Korean but it cannot explain why the English segments /$f, {\;}v, {\;}{\Theta}, {\;}{\breve{z}}, {\;}{\breve{c}}, {\;}{\breve{j}}$/ disappear during the adopting process. I present a set of universal constraints from the Optimality Theory proposed by Prince and Smolensky(l993) and I show how English segments differently adopted into Korean can be explained by these universal constraints such as Faith(feature). N oAffricateStop, Faith(nasal), NoNasalStop, Faith(voice), NoVoicedStop and the interaction of these constraints. I conclude that this Optimality Theory provides insights that better capture the nature of the phonological phenomena of English segments in Korean.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1191-1210
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• 2010

This article claims that English liquid consonants are characterized by the presence of complex place nodes, regardless of dialectal varieties. The primary difference between rhotic and laterals can be pursued in a phonological sense. The level of subbranching nodes is in charge of the disparities among two types of liquids: the branching immediately below the Coronal node with laterals, while branching at the secondary sublevel with rhotics. In this context, the processes of rhotic deletion and lateral vocalization can be understood as those motivated to get rid of complex place nodes. That is, those processes take place as part of phonological attrition. Next, the onset/coda asymmetry regarding liquids stems from the dispreference of vocoid at the onset position, which is readily accounted for by the series of constraints on the well-formedness on the onset, namely Harmonic Onset. The rationale of gradualness and harmonic improvement proposed by Harmonic Serialism is useful to separate the attested outputs from unattested ones across the whole gamut of English varieties. All in all, the primary benefits of our analysis can be found in the consistence in the explanation for the operations running through the sounds regarded as belonging to liquid consonants, comprising the whole range of rhotic and lateral consonants.

• MALSORI
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• no.38
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• pp.71-97
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• 1999

In this paper I have surveyed vowel phonemes in a variety of English accents and have proposed the vowel systems of English. The English accents covered in this paper include General American English, Northeastern American English, Western American English, Southern British English, Northern British English, Scottish English, Southern Irish English, Northern Irish English, Australian English, and New Zealand English. The vowel systems proposed here reflect the acoustic information of vowels and phonological aspects of English. This paper offers an Optimality Theory-based analysis of the English vowel systems by appealing to independently motivated constraints. This paper, following Flemming(1995), makes an assumption that the vowel system in question is selected in output as an optimal candidate by a given constraint ranking, the assumption which is different from the view that the vowel system is fixed in input. The analysis proposed here gives an answer to why a specific vowel system is selected and why dialectal variations come about. It is shown in this paper that the vowel system selected in a specific dialect comes from an optimal satisfaction of a given constraint ranking and that dialectal differences result from dynamic permutations of the same constraints. The constraint-based analysis proffered here accounts well for the similarities and differences among dialects in regard to the vowel system.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.95-109
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• 2004

Metrical Phonology has asserted that stress shift does not occur in English compounds because it violates the Continuous Column Constraint. Noun phrases, on the other hand, freely allow for stress shift, whereby the preceding stress moves forward to the preceding heavy syllable. This paper hypothesizes that stress does not shift in compounds as opposed to noun phrases and compares their pitch accentual patterns in a phonetic experiment. More specifically, we examined two-word combinations, noun phrases and compounds, whose boundaries involve stress clash and assured that the preceding words involve a heavy syllable ahead of the stress to guarantee the place for a shifting stress. Depending on where the preceding pitch accent is aligned, stress shift is determined. Results show that stress shift occurs in approximately 47% of the noun phrases and 59% of the compounds; therefore, the hypothesis is not borne out. This suggests that the surface representations derived by phonological rules may not be implemented in real utterance but that phonetic forms may be determined by the phonetic constraints. directly operating on human speech.

• MALSORI
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• no.38
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• pp.41-70
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• 1999

Researches on perception have, in recent years, been increasingly popular as a means of accounting for cross-linguistic sound patterns (Ohala, 1992; Hemming, 1995; Jun, 1995; Steriade, 1997 among others). In loanword phonology, Silverman(1990, 1992) argues that words from a source language are scanned through the perceptual level and that the features perceived by a speaker are stored in the input to be processed according to his/her native language's phonological constraints. The purpose of this paper is to test the validity of Silverman's proposal by examining the correlation between perception and production of Korean learners of English. We specifically focussed on perception and production of stop release by contrasting English loanwords with English words loarned through education to see if there were any significant differences. The results showed that there was no substantive correlation between the Korean speakers' perception of the loanwords pronounced by English speakers and their own production of those words. In the case of English words, however, the Korean speakers' production was closely related with their perception, although some inter-speaker variations were observed. With Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolenksy, 1993) as a theoretical framework of analysis, it was shown that the theory is a useful means of implementing a phonetics-phonology interface and relating perceptual processes with speech production. Specifically, under the assumption that loanwords with [t]~[t/sup h/] alternation (e.g.,'cut') are originally borrowed into Korean as two different input forms, all the alternations could be straightforwardly accounted for in terms of a unified ranking of constraints.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.246-246
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• 1996

Purpose: Some of the properties of the prosodic phrasing and some acoustic and phonological effects of contrastive focus on the tonal pattern of Seoul Korean is explored based on a brief experiment of analyzing the fundamental frequency(=FO) contour of the speech of the author. Data Base and Analysis Procedures: The examples were chosen to contain mostly nasal and liquid consonants, since it is difficult to track down the formants in stops and fricatives during their corresponding consonantal intervals and stops may yield an effect of unwanted increase in the FO value due to their burst into the following vowel. All examples were recorded three times and the spectrum of the most stable repetition was generated, from which the FO contour of each sentence was obtained, the peaks with a value higher than 250Hz being interpreted as a high tone (=H). The result is then discussed within the prosodic hierarchy framework of Selkirk (1986) and compared with the tonal pattern of the Northern Kyungsang dialect of Korean reported in Kenstowicz & Sohn (1996). Prosodic Phrasing: In N.K. Korean, H never appears both on the object and on the verb in a neutral sentence, which indicates the object and the verb form a single Phonological Phrase ($={\phi}$), given that there is only one pitch peak for each $={\phi}$. However, Seoul Korean shows that both the object and the verb have H of their own, indicating that they are not contained in one $={\phi}$. This violates the Optimality constraint of Wrap-XP (=Enclose a lexical head and its arguments in one $={\phi}$), while N.K. Korean obeys the constraint by grouping a VP in a single $={\phi}$. This asymmetry can be resolved through a constraint that favors the separate grouping of each lexical category and is ranked higher than Wrap-XP in Seoul Korean but vice versa in N.K. Korean; $Align-x^{lex}$ (=Align the left edge of a lexical category with that of a $={\phi}$). (1) nuna-ka manll-ll mEk-nIn-ta ('sister-NOM garlic-ACC eat-PRES-DECL') a. (LLH) (LLH) (HLL) ----Seoul Korean b. (LLH) (LLL LHL) ----N.K. Korean Focus and Phrasing: Two major effects of contrastive focus on phonological phrasing are found in Seoul Korean: (a) the peak of an Intonatioanl Phrase (=IP) falls on the focused element; and (b) focus has the effect of deleting all the following prosodic structures. A focused element always attracts the peak of IP, showing an increase of approximately 30Hz compared with the peak of a non-focused IP. When a subject is focused, no H appears either on the object or on the verb and a focused object is never followed by a verb with H. The post-focus deletion of prosodic boundaries is forced through the interaction of StressFocus (=If F is a focus and DF is its semantic domain, the highest prominence in DF will be within F) and Rightmost-IP (=The peak of an IP projects from the rightmost $={\phi}$). First Stress-F requires the peak of IP to fall on the focused element. Then to avoid violating Rightmost-IP, all the boundaries after the focused element should delete, minimizing the number of $={\phi}$'s intervening from the right edge of IP. (2) (omitted) Conclusion: In general, there seems to be no direct alignment constraints between the syntactically focused element and the edge of $={\phi}$ determined in phonology; all the alignment effects come from a single requirement that the peak of IP projects from the rightmost $={\phi}$ as proposed in Truckenbrodt (1995).

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.109-121
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• 2013

This study examined several kinematic properties of the primary articulator (the tongue dorsum) and the supplementary articulator (the jaw) in the articulation of the voiceless velar stop (/k/) within nonassimilating contexts. We examined in particular the spatiotemporal properties (constriction duration and constriction maxima) from the constriction onset to the constriction offset by analyzing a velar (/k/) followed by the coronal fricative (/s/), the coronal stop (/t/), and the labial (/p/) in across-word boundary conditions (/k#s/, /k#t/, and /k#p/). Along with these measurements, we investigated intergestural temporal coordination between C1 and C2 and the jaw articulator in relation to its coordination with the articulation of consonant sequences. The articulatory movement data was collected by means of electromagnetic midsagittal articulometry (EMMA). Four native speakers of Seoul Korean participated in the laboratory experiment. The results showed several characteristics. First, a velar (/k/) in C1 was not categorically reduced. Constriction duration and constriction degree of the velar (/k/) were similar within nonassimilating contexts (/k#s/=/k#t/=/k#p/). This might mean that spatiotemporal attributes during constriction duration were stable and consistent across different contexts, which might be subsequently associated with the nontarget status of the velar in place assimilation. Second, the gestural overlap could be represented as the order of /k#s/ (less) < /k#p/ (intermediate) < /k#t/ (more) as we measured the onset-to-onset lag (a longer lag indicated shorter gestural overlap.). This indicates a gestural overlap within nonassimilating contexts may not be constrained by any of the several constraints including the perceptual recoverability constraint (e.g., more overlap in Front-to-Back sequences compared to the reverse order (Back-to-Front) since perceptual cues in C1 can be recovered anytime during C2 articulation), the low-level speech motor constraint (e.g., more overlap in lingual-nonlingual sequences as compared to the lingual-lingual sequences), or phonological contexts effects (e.g., similarity in gestural overlap within nonassimilating contexts). As one possible account for more overlap in /k#t/ sequences as compared to /k#p/, we suspect speakers' knowledge may be receptive to extreme encroachment on C1 by the gestural overlap of the coronal in C2 since it does not obscure the perceptual cue of C1 as much as the labial in C2. Third, actual jaw position during C2 was higher in coronals (/s/, /t/) than in the labial (/p/). However, within the coronals, there was no manner-dependent jaw height difference in C2 (/s/=/t/). Vertical jaw position of C1 and C2 was seen as inter-dependent as higher jaw position in C1 was closely associated with C2. Lastly, a greater gap in jaw height was associated with longer intergestural timing (e.g., less overlap), but was confined to the cluster type (/kp/) with the lingual-nonlingual sequence. This study showed that Korean jaw articulation was independent from coordinating primary articulators in gestural overlap in some cluster types (/k#s/, /k#t/) while not in others (e.g., /k#p/). Overall, the results coherently indicate the velar stop (/k/) in C1 was robust in articulation, which may have subsequently contributed to the nontarget status of the velar (/k/) in place assimilation processes.