최적성이론에 입각한 국어의 하향이중모음체계에 관한 연구: 역사적 변천과정의 분석을 중심으로

Abstract

This article aims to present a diachronic account of how the off-glides in Middle Korean have gone through convergence on /ɨj/ in Early Modern Korean and Modern Korean. I claim that there are inherent limitations in previous treatments in that their analyses employed crucial constraints embedding the observation to be explained, which leads to cyclicity in their argument. My account is based on the theoretical framework of Shane (1984), where three elementary particles represent phonological traits. I also take an already-established assumption that off-glides dominate two moras which contrast with on-glides with just one mora. The consequence in my analysis is that only off-glides are subject to diachronic sound changes in question. I provide a ranking of relevant constraints that derives all the off-glides in Middle Korean. The disappearance of all the off-glides except /ɨj/ after Middle Korean nicely falls out from re-ranking a single constraint. The most important finding in this article is the fact that the long-time process of off-glide conversion turned out to be due to an economic mechanism of re-ranking in a theory of constraint interaction.