A Constraint - Based Account of English and Korean Place Assimilation

This paper examines place assimilation in English and Korean under Correspondence Theory. Although several phonological phenomena, such as place assimilation, insertion, and deletion argue for coronal underspecification, other facts like morpheme structure conditions demand coronal specification. This paper shows that place assimilation can be accounted for in a principled way with the markedness hierarchy which ranks coronals low within Correspondence Theory, without appealing to coronal underspecification. It also shows that the Korean-specific asymmetry effect in place assimilation receives a natural explanation under Correspondence Theory, which allows the variations of constraint ranking among languages.