The Identities of the Stem-final Consonants of p- and t-irregular Verbs in Korean

This paper explores to identify the stem-final consonants of p- and t-irregular verbs in Korean within the framework of Government Phonology. Since the advent of Generative Phonology, the phenomenon of irregular verbal conjugation has been of great interest to Korean phonologists both in linear and non-linear approaches. When we examine these analyses, we find that one of the major issues concerns the identities of the stem-final consonants of p- and t-irregular verbs. The proposals concerning this issue vary considerably from one another. In this paper, I put forward a different view from those proposals in that the stem-fmal consonants of p- and tirregular verbs are tensed p' and t' respectively.