The behavior of velar nasal and syllabification in Korean

Abstract

Across languages including Korean, a string C1V1C2V2C3 is generally syllabified as C1 V 1 .C2 V 2C3 but not as C1 V 1 C2.V 2C3. This is largely due to the fact that languages prefer a syllable with an onset, which is explained by Ito (1986) as a Universal Core Syllable Condition or by Prince and Smolenky (1993) as an optimality-theoretic constraint 'Onset'. In Korean, a C1V1C2V2C3 string is generally syllabified as C1V1.C2V2C3. However, when the velar nasal lr.JI is C2, it is not syllabified as the onset of the second syllable but rather as the coda of the preceding syllable. The main purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we investigate the behavior of the velar nasal with respect to syllabification in syllable coda position. On the other hand, we also investigate the variation among speakers regarding strategies to avoid an onsetless syllable over a morpheme boundary in which the second morpheme begins with the glide /y/ in Korean, as well as the variation between Seoul dialect (SD) and Kyungsang dialect (KD) with respect to ways to deal with the velar nasal in the syllable coda position. We provide an analysis within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), particularly the more enhanced version called Correspondence Theory (McCarthy and Prince 1995). This paper tries to shed more light on various cases of syllabification in Korean. The organization of this paper is as follows. In section 2, we present the data. In section 3, we propose optimality-theoretic constraints and their interaction and provide an analysis based on the constraints and their ranking. Finally, we sum up the paper in section 4.