영어 불규칙 동사의 굴절과 파생연구

The purpose of this study is to analyze the inflection of English verbs in the past or the past participle with the framework of optimality theory. I demonstrate and argue that the irregular forms of past or past participle are caused by the same the inflectional morphemes as those of regular verbs. Particularly, when stem vowels in the present verbs change into another vowels to function as the past or past participle, it has been considered that the unpredictable and exceptional rules cause the vowel alternation because there is no environmental factors. In this paper, however, I regard the changed vowels ,in the past or past participle, as the same kind of morphemes as the affixes that are attached to the ends of the regular verbs. Generally, when a certain segment is inserted or deleted in a word, quantitative change such as vowel shortening or vowel lengthening arises to preserve the structure of the word. Therefore I set up some constraints and analyze some candidates to draw the optimal form through them and I demonstrate that the quantity change causes the quality surface forms.