Stochastic restrictions in intrasyllabic phoneme strings based on a surface level and a proposal for an emerging model
Shinae Park (Kyungpook National University)
Abstract
This corpus-based study aims to demonstrate that structural restrictions in intrasyllabic
phoneme strings are not categorical but stochastic. To achieve this goal, an attempt was
made to quantify the cohesion strength between sub-syllabic phonemes by measuring
the correlation coefficient, gamma-phi. The sources were collected from ‘Moduui
Corpus’ provided by the National Institute of Korean Language. A total of 4,202 noun
words were extracted, and 7186 C1VC2 syllables were analyzed. The findings indicate
that, in the surface forms, the mean values of gamma-phi for C1Vs are statistically
greater than those for VC2s across twelve sub-corpora. However, in specific syllables,
some VC2s exhibit greater cohesion strength than C1Vs. This study concludes that
cohesion between sub-syllabic roles is sequence-specific and suggests that the sub-
syllabic constituency represents the emergence of phoneme sequences with relatively
greater cohesion strength based on the surface forms, not primitive structures. Finally,
an emerging model is proposed as an alternative representation of Korean syllables.
The current study achieves the quantification of structural restrictions in Korean
syllables and contributes to addressing the limitations of traditional syllable models by
exploring the intrasyllabic system through empirical data.
Keywords
syllable structure, stochastic, sub-syllabic constituents, cohesion, intrasyllabic, quantify, gamma-phi, restriction, Python