모음충돌 회피를 위한 한국어의 다양한 음운과정에 관한 통합적 분석

Vowel clash avoidance in Korean: A unified approach to various phonological alternations

The central issue I wish to explore in this article is the nature of vowel clash avoidance in terms of universal constraints, the interaction of which is responsible for the various phonological alternations. Those alternations are known to be essentially caused by vowel clash. Such strategies as coalescence, deletion, and glide-formation are well-known enough to constitute the major resolutions of the clash. I propose that along with ONS, a constraint against generating off-glides plays a crucial role in driving the vowel sequence avoidance. I also claim that the asymmetrical behavior of /ɨ/ in Korean phonology should be independently described in the grammar in terms of a faithfulness constraint. I argue that the above three different clash avoidance strategies as well as dialectal variation are nicely explained in terms of the interaction between the proposed markedness constrains and other relevant faithfulness ones. Throughout the analysis, I maintain a single language-specific ranking of constraints for Korean, allowing re-ranking only for dialectal variation. I claim that the current analysis overcomes the limitation of previous treatments within the OT framework on both descriptive and theoretical grounds.