An Onset Augmentation in English, Korean and Chinese through OT

An Onset Augmentation in English, Korean and Chinese through OT

This paper focuses on comparing the onset augmentation phenomenon in English, Korean and Chinese together, and tries to find out the similarities and differences among them. Based on the data exhibition, I found that the onset augmentation phenomenon acts very different in three languages. Most of the previous attempts were done within rule-based theories. They focused on careful analysis of onset conditions mostly. However none of them could satisfactorily cover all of the data from the three languages, much less to reveal the shared features among them. In order to deal with the problem, I depended on OT to explore the data from the three languages, and have been able to explain the issue at hand successfully. The constraint hierarchies I have decided to eaplain the onset augmentation phenomenon of the three languages are as follows: · English: ON-CON>>NO-CODA>>IDENT-IO · Korean: ON-CON>>NO-CODA>>IDNET-IO · Chinese: IDNET-IO>>ON-CON>>NO-CODA Depending on these three constraint hierarchies, the differences among the three languages can be shown via IDENT-IO, which refers to the preservation of the input form; and the similarities of the three languages can be expressed by ON-CON, which means that all three languages are required to follow onset conditions.