earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to explore how English nasals have unique property of preserving manner feature, so they can not be the target of manner assimilation even though they experience place assimilation. This paper argues that the reason for preserving nasals is due to sufficient feature perceptual cues that English nasals carry. In the universal perceptibility scales, stops are ranked higher than nasals, but this paper insists that the opposite is true in English. Stops are more frequent target of assimilation than nasals. Furthermore the reason why a certain feature is assimilated is not because place assimilation depends on preserving the rank of manner feature but because manner and place features are working separately from each other. Therefore, we propose each of the preserving ranks of place and manner feature in English. To show that nasals have higher preserving rank, we compare and analyze perceptibilities of each features with perceptual constraints in a cluster C1C2 where assimilation occurs