ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The main purpose of this paper is to present an account of how the deletion of Old English /h/ is adequately explained given the assumption that the phenomenon is a result of constraint interactions. I make a critical review of Kim(2005) where prosodic template is adopted for the purpose of delimiting a scope, out of which the /h/ is deleted. This provides an elegant analysis of the /h/-deletion, though not an entirely unproblematic one. Clearly, the best aspect of his analysis is that it makes use of independently motivated prosodic template which is the driving force behind this seemingly complex /h/-deletion. On the other hand, this analysis also raises certain conceptual problems. I propose an alternative treatment of the /h/-deletion which overcomes those problems while preserving the advantages of adopting prosodic template in the analysis of the phenomenon. I claim that the template is no longer needed in the framework of Optimality Theory in the sense of McCarthy and Prince(1993, 1995) and all the patterns of /h/-deletion can be nicely explained by the interactions of a small number of independently motivated universal constraints.

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