음성음운형태론연구 18집 3호 An, Young-ran

An, Young-ran. 2012. Identity avoidance and speaker preference in Korean.Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 18.3. 397-412.

The principle of identity avoidance, aka OCP, is universally attested in many unrelated languages. This paper introduces such a case from Korean, which is curious in that it does not simply obey the principle of identity avoidance in a categorical manner. At issue with this principle is variation in speakers’ preferences, which seems to be still one of the factors in operation toward gradience in a phonological phenomenon. In a type of total reduplication in Korean, a consonant is inserted in the onset position of the first syllable of a reduplicant, e.g. allok-tallok. Based on the data from a dictionary and a word creation experiment, the inserted consonants were found inclinable to the identity avoidance principle. Besides, the experiment showed that speakers prefer to have certain consonants as inserted consonants, irrespective of identity avoidance, which contributes to the non-categorical tendency of identity avoidance. (Korea Christian University)