Heterophonic Homographs in Korean and English

Abstract

In many languages, there are words whose spelling and phonological form do not form a one-to-one relationship. The focus of this study is on Korean and English heterophonic homographs, where two or more distinct words with the same spelling have a unique phonological form (e.g., 대가 [tɛga] 大家 / [tɛk’a] 代價, lead [lid] / [lɛd]). This study collects Korean heterophonic homographs directly from a large Korean corpus and analyzes them, while English heterophonic homographs are analyzed using the lists presented in Martin, Jones, Nelson, & Nelson(1981) and Bergeron(1990). This study categorizes Korean and English heterophonic homographs according to their types and compares their characteristics from a linguistic perspective. In this study, it is shown that the phonological differences in Korean heterophonic homograph pairs are relatively simpler than those in English ones. It is also shown that the heterophonic homograph pairs in Korean and English reflect the inherent nature of the interaction between morphological and phonological processes in Korean and English.