ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The main purpose of this paper is to present an account of how the syllable-final cluster simplification in Korean can be adequately explained given the assumption that the adjacent consonants across a syllable boundary requires a distinct feature specification of [grave], which is captured as a constraint DISTINCTNESS(place) in this paper. When combined with the comparative markedness in the sense of McCarthy (2002), the constraint plays a crucial role in terms of the interaction with the other independently-motivated constraints in the literature. I make a review of previous OT analyses of the phenomena which had no alternative but to introduce a re-ranking of relevant constraints with a view to explaining intra-dialect syllable-final variations of some stems. I propose that the variations in question can be settled without re-ranking the constraints by adopting a relevant constraint in the analysis. It will be shown that the one and only constraint ranking I propose in this paper is capable of explaining not only the established data in the literature but also some other that apparently threatens the single constraint ranking the grammar requires.

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