earticle

영어

In Korean, either nasalization or lateralization occurs to avoid nasal- liquid sequences. However, the choice depends on the lexical items. For example, some words like /shinlaŋ/ ‘husband’ undergo lateralization resulting in [shillaŋ], whereas others like /ɨmunlon/ ‘phonology’ undergo nasalization resulting in [ɨmunnon]. According to Lee (2006), nasalization occurs when nasal and liquid sounds appear across the morpheme boundary. Thus, /ɨmun+lon/ causes nasalization instead of lateralization. Then, how are English words including nasal-liquid sequence pronounced by Korean speakers? To answer this question, this study examines the pronunciation of 10 Korean female middle-school students about nasal- liquid sequence found in both Korean and English. The result of the experiment exhibits some aspects: (i) nasal-liquid sequences are actually pronounced as various ways according to speaker’s recognition of each lexical item, (ii) such optionality of Korean words is consistently transferred into English, (iii) ungrammatical processes in Korean such as deletion or insertion to avoid nasal-liquid sequence never occur in English pronunciation as well. This study provides explicit account for such aspects by adopting optional lexical indexation (Park 2008b) within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1995). In addition, this study shows that optional lexical indexation is superior to the previous approach of constraints re-ranking in accounting for phonological optionality and transfer.