earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to explore distributional variants of English /l/s which are differently realized depending on their contexts, to suggest different methods of analysis through feature geometry, and to compare two contrastive analyses of variants in English dialects, GA and RP, which are performed by rule orderings and level approach each differently. Generally, allophony of the English lateral is shown in two types of forms, prevocalic (clear or light)-l and post-vocalic (dark)-l. These are phonetically distinguishable. However, when we look into some examples, there are other cases in which the /l/s become deleted as in talk or syllabic -ls as in bottle. This paper attempted to account for variants of /l/ in phonological approaches. First, this study showed that, in the cases of the dark-l and l-deletion in monosyllabic words, different methods of analysis suggested in feature geometry with phonetic information were clearer and more concise than the approaches based on rule orderings. Second, for the identification of the clear and dark-l, this paper introduced level approaches to account for these variations. As a result, they offer briefer and more convincing explanations to variants in words which were followed by morphological boundaries or were disyllabic than approaches based on rule orderings.