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영어

The purpose of this paper is to investigate gradience of identity avoidance in terms of speakers’ variation. In a Korean total reduplication where a consonant is epenthesized in the initial onset of the reduplicants, a general tendency was found: the epenthetic consonants incline to be dissimilar from the contextual consonants. This tendency, however, is not an across-the-board phenomenon. One of the factors for this non-categoricalness was found to be variation among speakers. A series of experiments revealed that different speakers showed their own preferences among different consonants for insertion. It was further found that among different groups of speakers due to their preferences for inserted consonants, there was also micro-level variation. Some speakers sticked to the same preferred segment for consonant insertion, whereas others chose another consonant when they were faced with their own preferred consonant in the existing context. This latter group of speakers seem to be affected by the principle of identity avoidance, albeit their preference for a certain consonant.