초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper discusses the underlying representation of tense consonants in Korean, which has been one of the most controversial issues in Korean phonology during the past decades. In the literature, it has been proposed that a tense consonant is underlyingly represented by a single tense consonant (the singleton hypothesis) and that this consonant is represented by a sequence of two (identical) lenis obstruents (the geminate hypothesis). One piece of the empirical evidence supporting the geminate hypothesis is that the closure duration of tense consonants in intervocalic position is more than twice as long in comparison with their lenis counterparts. In this paper, we report on the closure durations of three types of plosives in various contexts in Korean. The results of the measurement show that the duration of tense consonants varies depending on contexts: the duration of the tense consonants in post-sonorant contexts is reduced by almost a third in comparison with the duration of the tense consonants in intervocalic position. These temporal differences suggest that the measurement of closure durations in intervocalic position alone is not sufficient to sustain the geminate hypothesis.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
plosives in Korean, closure duration, underlying representation of tense consonants, the singleton and the geminate hypothesis
