현대국어 사잇소리에 대한 관견 - 현대국어 화자의 사잇소리의 인식과 사잇소리의 실현 양상을 중심으로 -

Abstract

This paper examines, contemporary Korean sait-sori (medial sound) through speakers’ perception and the aspect of realization of sait-sori. Textbooks by traditional grammarians show that grammatical recognition was weakened after genitive‘ㅅ’ (genitive s) became extinct. Because of this, the grammarians were reluctant to write sai-siot in the same way as contemporary speakers. This tells us that sait-sori does not have any meaning or function. Therefore the standard of realization does not correspond to the norms of written and spoken Korean: there are some words that do not meet the standards of the norm. As a result of equivocal realization standards, words with a low intimacy degree do not tend to realize sait-sori and speakers use other means such as siot prepositionality, siot postpositionality and analogy. As speakers can not specify the standards, the realization of sait-sori is out of regularity and it is impossible to figure out its distribution. Through this study, we find that sait-sori is a concept that is difficult to define in any fields, including phonology. As a result, sait-sori in contemporary Korean has merely survived in words with high frequency and is now declining.