모음체계의 변화와 방언접촉: 국어의 ‘·’ 소실 현상을 중심으로

초록

The goal of this paper is to present an Optimality-theoretic approach to the phenomenon that the change of a vowel system is activated by the most unstable vowel in the vowel system and it is also influenced by external factors, such as dialect contact. For achieving this goal, this paper focuses on the analysis of the loss of a low back vowel in Korean. In the framework of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993, Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004), this phenomenon is analyzed in relation to conflicting constraints. The analysis proposed by this paper shows that the vowel shift in Middle Korean is a result of the constraint ranking where a listener-oriented faithfulness constraint outranks speaker-oriented faithfulness ones. It further shows that the loss of the Korean low back vowel is influenced by dialect contact and its influence is formalized by the constraint ranking where an output-output faithfulness constraint outranks input-output faithfulness ones.

키워드