This study aims to verify the left-branching syllable structure in Korean, Japanese, Chinese and English. Since a lot of scholars started to consider the internal structure of syllable to be an important thing, the studies on syllable have focused on ...
This study aims to verify the left-branching syllable structure in Korean, Japanese, Chinese and English. Since a lot of scholars started to consider the internal structure of syllable to be an important thing, the studies on syllable have focused on the internal structure of syllable. There are two kinds of branching structure : the right-branching and the left branching. The former has the unit, rhyme that consists of the nucleus and the coda. In this, a syllable includes the onset and the rhyme. The latter has the core that consists of the onset and the nucleus. Usually the former has been considered as the universal syllable structure of all languages. But the main purpose of this is to argue that the left-branching syllable structure is suitable for Korean, Japanese, Chinese and English.
Although the right-branching syllable is considered a universal structure there also exists some evidence that argues for the left-branching structure. First, the Maximal Onset Principle is applied to every syllable in every language. It is a rule that indicates we have to connect an onset with a nucleus prior to a coda. In addition, because the branching structure is originated from Syntax and it has to be built from bottom to top, the structure in the right branching syllable violates structure building. Therefore, we need to investigate each language so that we can see the left-branching structure is a proper one for each language.
In order to see this fact, this study examines some phonological phenomena in Korean, Japanese, Chinese and English. It is proven that the former three languages have a left-branching structure in the presented phenomena.
To explain English we have to create two structures : deep and surface, like in transformational generative grammar, because English needs the rhyme absolutely. Since English is a stress-based language, we have to look at the rhyme in order to assign a stress in syllables. The rhyme in a monosyllable must have at least two elements and in a polysyllabic word, if the rhyme of the penultimate has at least two elements, then a primary stress is definitely assigned to the penultimate. If not, namely the rhyme of the penultimate has just one elements, a nucleus, the antepenultimate has the primary stress. Therefore in English the unit, rhyme is necessary and we need two structures. The syllable in English is made as follows. First, because of MOP, it has left-branching structure in deep structure but for rhyme, the transformation takes place. In surface structure it has the right-branching structure.
As a result, it makes sense that the languages that we have dealt with can be explained by the left-branching syllable structure. Korean, Japanese and Chinese have the same structure in both deep and surface structure because they do not have to go through any transformation. However, in English, the left-branching syllable structure in the deep structure will be transformed into the right-branching in the surface structure
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