earticle

영어

When English words are adapted into North Kyungsang (NK) Korean as loanwords, the English stress is disregarded and a high tone is newly assigned according to the NK accent rule. If a word has only one heavy syllable, high tone is generally assigned on the heavy syllable. Yet, if a word has more than one heavy syllable, a hierarchy is formed between the heavy syllables for the assignment of high tone. However, previous studies present different opinions on to which syllable high tone is preferred to be assigned when a word has two or more heavy syllables. This study provides more objective and accurate evidence on the hierarchy between heavy syllables. Moreover, to figure out the constraints that influence the hierarchy, this study further proposes the underlying foot structures of each syllable combination based on the main tone patterns. This study reveals that the constraint that parses heavy syllables in a foot has an important role in relation to the bimoraic trochee and context-dependent coda moraicity to form the hierarchy between heavy syllables of NK English loanwords in high tone assignment. This study also proposes that parsing word-initial heavy syllables in a foot is ranked higher than other constraints such as the bimoraic trochee and parsing the other heavy syllables in a foot.