히아투스와 음절

Abstract

This study aims to elucidate the phonological motivation of hiatus-resolving processes in Korean. Traditonally, hiatus-resolving phonological processes such as vowel coalescenece have been analyzed mainly in terms of segmental phonotactics, that is , avoiding vowel sequences. In this paper, however, it is argued that hiatus resolution is a syllable-level phonological phenomemnon, not a segment-level one. All the phonological processes conspiring for hiatus resolution have the same phonological motivation: avoiding the generation of marked syllables that are onsetless. The rationale behind the main assumption of this paper is that phonological analysis must be based on the relevant phonological unit.