Doctoral Dissertation Improvement: Revisiting the Variable Deletion of Labiovelar Glide (w)

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This dissertation project investigates how (w)-deletion in Seoul Korean varies according to linguistic and social factors and how it has evolved over time, using three different approaches. The first part of the project examines how the (w)-deletion patterns have changed by comparing spontaneous speech data collected in 2015 with data from 1990s. Second, it provides a model where a phonological rule changes its shape after losing a phonological conditioning. The third part of the project explores different tongue configurations used by speakers participating in the change in the (w)-deletion patterns in Seoul Korean. The acoustic data will be gathered through sociolinguistic interviews in which participants are asked to talk about topics they feel comfortable with. Participants include native Seoul speakers from different groups of age, social class and gender. A comparison will be made between these data with those from earlier studies on (w)-deletion in Seoul Korean which will reveal how the (w)-deletion patterns have evolved over time. The articulatory data will be obtained from native Seoul speakers in different age groups using ultrasound tongue imaging. This project will contribute important knowledge about ongoing sound changes taking place in Seoul Korean and what factors influence these changes. Discoveries from this project will also shed new light on the evolution of phonological processes, which will inform the principles of linguistic change as well as the interaction between human cognitive processes and social interactions. Lastly, the socio-articulatory data in the project have great potential to answer questions that we have not been able to answer with acoustic and auditory studies. Linking articulatory data with acoustic data will provide a new avenue of sociolinguistic research in studying language variation and change.