Lexically Marked and Unmarked Vocoids for Syllabicity in Korean

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Some phonologists, such as Guerssel (1986) and Harris and Kaisse (1999), claim that there is a lexical distinction between high vocoids (i.e., [+high, -consonantal] segments in underlying representation); some are marked for syllabicity in the underlying representation whereas others are unmarked. In this paper I show that Korean supports this claim. The lexically marked ones are always realized as high vowels. The unmarked ones are realized as both high vowels and glides within a syllable. When these vocoids are sonority peaks within a syllable, or cannot be incorporated into a permissible diphthong, they are realized as high vowels; otherwise, they are realized as glides within a syllable2). I provide evidence for this from stem-final high vocoids in verbs.
The following sections discuss Korean high vocoids first, then move on to those of Spanish and Berber among others to show that the marked and unmarked high vocoids are observed cross-linguistically.