음성적 유표성 위계와 보편적 모음과의 상관관계 연구

A Research on the Relation between the Hierarchy of Phonetic Markedness and Universal Vowels

This paper discusses the universality of the vowels based on the hierarchy of the phonetic featural markedness. First we analyze the hierarchy of the three vowel features with the notion of markedness. We find that the Height is the least marked and apply at first in production of human vowels, and the roundness is most marked, and the backness is between the two features. I propose a height hierarchy for vowels, *MID > *HIGH > *LOW. As for the backness, we have two different criterion; in case of the feature low, on the one hand, the feature central is relative unmarked than the other two. In other cases, on the other hand, the markedness appears reverse. Likewise, the roundness also shows two different interpretations. The feature round is unmarked if it appears in back vowels, whereas it functions as marked in other places. Based on this finding, we apply the hierarchy of the phonetic vowel markedmess to 3 to 7 vowel-systems that are universally seen in human languages, and find that vowels are generated according to the stage of gradual application of the hierarchy given.