A Constraint-based Analysis of English Loanwords in Korean with a Word-initial Consonant-Glide Sequence

The purpose of this paper is to provide a formal analysis of word-initial consonant-glide (CG) sequences in English loanword adaptation in Korean, within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1995). The process brings some challenging aspects in that an alveolar consonant and labial-velar glide (/tw/) sequence induces vowel-epenthesis in loanword adaptation, while the other CG sequences are perfectly acceptable in both loanwords and native words in Korean, The discrepancy of /tw/ sequences in loanwords and native words has been accounted for by perceptional and acoustic experiments in many works. This study exhibits the asymmetric behavior between English /tw-/ and /kw-/ with respect to vowel epenthesis found in loanwords in Korean can best be formalized by postulating fixed input for loan phonology from the perceptual basis without any special constraints and ranking only for loan phonology.