초록 열기/닫기 버튼
It is obvious that the search for universals of segmental systems of natural languages is one of the fundamental issues in the study of phonology. This paper discusses universals of vowel systems in terms of three major dimensions, namely openness, frontness and roundness, mainly based on the data of UPSID (UCLA Phonologicaal Segment Inventory Database) containing phonological segments of 451 distinct languages. In addition to some previous works such as Hyman (2008) which has established some descriptive universals concerning vowel systems, we have attempted to (re-)analyse the data with the notion of ‘underlying phoneme’ to find universals which are believed to exist in our mental grammar. For this we have considered the question: are there absolute universals with no exceptions with respect to height, front and round. We have drawn the conclusion that every vowel system has the contrasts between low and high, between front and back, and between rounded and unrounded.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
vowel system, universals, descriptive universal, analytic universal, absolute universal, underlying phoneme, phonetic realization
