Generating Interlanguage Syllabification in Optimality Theory
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper proposes an Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993) [OT]-based generator of the Interlanguage [IL]1 syllabification of Korean speakers of English. Basically, I accept the ideas of 'cyclic CON-EVAL loop' and 'locally encoded finite candidate set' proposed by Hammond (1995, 1997b). However, in order to treat some features of Korean accented English such as vowel epenthesis, segment modification (stop voicing, devoicing, nasalization, etc.), and ambisyllabicity, I suppose that the input string of phonemes be linked to two templates of candidate grid sets; one for syllable position, and the other for (finite) possible output segments for each input segment. I will also use the ALIGN family of constraints to treat the Korean coda neutralization phenomena effectively. * The generator in this paper is a subsystem of my Korean Accented English Pronunciation Simulator [KAEPS] system, which is part of the Ph.D. dissertation I am writing. The KAEPS system is implemented in PERL and deals with pronunciation not only of word-level but also of phrase-level English orthographic representations. The output of the KAEPS is three types of English pronunciations: 1) a phoneme-based English pronunciation, 2) a desirable allophone-based English pronunciation, and 3) one or some possible Korean accented English pronunciation(s). It is run on the Web and its URL is http://epsilon3.georgetown.edu/~kimhk/cgi-bin/kaeps/. I am grateful to Lisa Zsiga and an anonymous reader for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, and to Cathy Ball and Donna Lardiere for their help and encouragement which aided me in accomplishing this project, and also to Michael Hammond for allowing me to try to revise his parser (1995) in order to make it compatible with my KAEPS system. Of course, all errors or mistakes in this paper are mine. 1 Selinker (1969, 1972) proposed and elaborated the term "interlanguage" to explain the unique utterance of L2 learners. It is regarded as a separate linguistic system which results from a learner's attempts to produce a target language norm.
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