On the monophthongization of /ɨi/ in Seoul Corpus

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate variations of monophthongization and acoustical characteristics of /ɨi/ found in Seoul Corpus. Monophthongization occurs in 93.04% of a total of 2,370 tokens and in higher than 99% of the cases with onsets and also of non-initial position in a word. However, only 31.82% of word initial tokens are monophthongized, which supports the findings that Seoul Korean still retains /ɨi/ as a diphthong, though only in some restricted contexts. 94.40% of monophthongized /ɨi/ tokens are realized as [i] except for the cases of genitive case marking which mostly show [e]. In word initial position, though, 61.74% of the monophthongized diphthong tokens are realized as [ɨ] and in the other cases as [i]. This result assumes that the phonological characteristics of /ɨi/ are totally different in terms of its position (word initial or non-initial) or its grammatical role as a genitive case marker.