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영어

The purpose of this paper is to explain the vowel epenthesis arising in both plural noun forms and past-tense verb forms. At first I adopted a rule-based approach for analyzing the phonological phenomena, but there were a few analytical problems. Next I considered a hierarchical feature method as an alternative. In this analytical process, I explained how the Obligatory Contour Principle (hereinafter, OCP) works within the framework of hierarchical feature method. In this paper, I will show that the OCP, which may be a rule-trigger or a rule-blocker in rule application, plays an important role in the vowel insertion rule as the rule-blocker. Although these give us some understanding about vowel insertion, they don’t provide a completely satisfying explanation for the phenomenon. Therefore, I adopted a new approach based on the Optimality Theory, which provides us a synthetic explanation by using some constraints and ranking these appropriately without depending on rule-ordering and derivation.