한국언어과학회

This paper explores the syllable position of alveolar stop and glottal stop, and tries to reinterpret the principle of English glottalization with feature preservation constraints. Unlike the widely known view that glottalization is one of the allophones of voiceless alveolar stop, this study suggests that glottalization is the result of perceiving glottal stop due to the deletion of voiceless alveolar stop. Apart from glottalization of voiceless alveolar stop, glottal stop can also appear in front of the initial vowel which has a pause right before pronouncing it, and it has been considered different from the allophones of alveolar stop. However, based on the glottal stop before a syllable-initial vowel, from the phenomenon known as that alveolar stop is glottalized before syllabic consonant such as nasal or lateral sound, this paper assumes that there also exists glottal stop in front of those syllabic consonants. Because nasal or lateral has also high sonority like vowels, when they have an initial pause from deletion of alveolar stop, they can have glottal stop sound after the pause. Two perspectives, which glottal stop from glottalization is syllable-final and the one in front of a vowel is syllable initial, conflict with each other. This study, therefore, considers the former and the latter to be the same elements as a syllable-initial, explaining the principle with the view of feature preservation.