Prosody Matters - Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Selkirk - Toni Borowsky
3. The formal definition of the ONSET constraint and implications for Korean syllable structure
Prosody Matters - Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Selkirk - Toni Borowsky
Jennifer Smith
University of North Carolina
Description
This paper provides additional support for the formal definition of ONSET proposed in Smith (2002, 2003, 2008), a definition that makes reference to no details of syllable-internal structure other than the fundamental head/nonhead distinction. This head-based definition of ONSET has crosslinguistic empirical support and contributes to a view of the phonology-phonetics interface according to which constraints are only indirectly related to phonetic factors, even when functionally motivated. In the discussion that follows, the head- based definition of ONSET is shown to allow for a consistent, noncontradictory phonological analysis of the syllable position of glides in Korean.