ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The goal of this article is to show that adequate and insightful analyses are indeed possible within OT for the manner assimilation phenomena in Korean. The work begins by unveiling the factors governing the bidirectional assimilation of relevant manner features and then formulating them in terms of universal constraints. I attempt to provide an OT approach to the issue of manner assimilation of coronal consonants in Korean. In spite of the apparent bidirectionality issue of the assimilation (i.e., /n + l/ or / l+ n/ [n.n] or [l.l]), I notice that there are interactions of universal constraints conspiring to a single process. This proposal is expected to result in far-reaching consequences for properly analyzing apparently irregular alternations of morphemes in compounding or affixation, extending easily to a unified explanation for them. It will be shown that the seemingly unrelated and complicated behaviors of those morphemes are basically due to the interaction of a small set of proposed universal constraints. I also make a critical review of a couple of previous OT research on lateralization in Korean and try to show how my analysis overcomes some of limitations they potentially face.

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