earticle

영어

Lexical phonology classifies different levels or strata to explain different behavior of nasal assimilation among nasal-final prefixes in English. Nasal-final prefix /un/ does not undergo nasal assimilation; it does not assimilate to a place or manner feature of its trigger over a morpheme boundary. It is apt to have a strong boundary effect. Nasal-final prefix /en/, however, is sensitive to place assimilation though it is immune to manner assimilation. Such asymmetric behavior underlies that place assimilation is more productive than manner assimilation in English. Unlike the above two prefixes, prefix /in/ variously surfaces as [im], [iŋ], [il], [ir], etc. Prefix /in/ assimilates both place and manner assimilation to the stem-initial consonant with no cost. The different behavior of nasal assimilation among nasal-final prefixes in English is due to different underlying feature specification in lexical phonology point of view. However, OT does not support underlying feature specification. In this paper, OT accounts for such disparity in nasal assimilation adopting constraints and their interaction. The major issue of the paper is to investigate what causes disparity of nasal assimilation among nasal-final prefixes and provides constraint-based analysis. Subcategorization constraint dominating crisp-edge effect explains nasal assimilation in English. Running against rule-based stratal phonology, this paper proposes a new insight to solve asymmetry of nasal assimilation among different nasal-final prefixes in English.