Position and Height Asymmetries in Hiatus Resolution: A case study of Korean VV sequences

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:Typological patterns in synchronic data, for example, the question of why pattern A is more frequent than B across languages, have been one of the most important issues in linguistics, in particular in phonology. Ohala (1993) seeks the answer in human articulatory and/or auditory mechanisms. If a phonetic ‘perturbation’ is not corrected properly in perception, a hypo-correction could occur and it could result in a sound change. In this model, typological patterns are assumed to reflect the very variation in ordinary speech. Two crosslinguistic asymmetries in hiatus reso-lution are the main concerns in this paper. Casali (1996) and Rosenthall (1997) present positional and height asymmetries. They take another approach to the ty-pological patterns in that they suggest universal constraints and rankings to ac-count for the asymmetries in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). Crosslinguistically, hiatus resolution such as vowel deletion or gliding is more likely to occur in V1 and high vowels than in V2 and non-high vowels. If these patterns result from human articulatory and auditory mechanisms as Ohala (1993) argues, it would be expected that the production of vowel se-quences will show a pattern of phonetic variation, which is similar to the phono-logical processes. As the first step, a set of acoustic data on Korean hiatus is pre-sented in this paper. The results will show that V1 in hiatus is consistently shorter than V2, which corresponds to the positional asymmetry in Casali (1996). As for the height asymmetry, it will be reported that high vowels are more reduced in fast speech, compared to their durations in slow speech.