Dimensions in Korean Laryngeal Phonology*

The often-cited phenomenon of ‘‘post-obstruent tensing’’ in Korean is taken here to be primarily a skeletal strengthening rather than a feature accretion. On this view, a tense consonant in Korean phonologically fills two skeletal timing slots, i.e., forms a geminate, and the fact that it is articulated with a discernable degree of tension, or glottal constriction, derives from the effects of a surface embellishment which (amending Avery and Idsardi, 2001). We term Korean Enhancement. The special quality of Korean tense consonants then is that they are phonological geminates phonetically augmented with the laryngeal dimension of Glottal Width, which implicates a gesture of glottal constriction; elsewhere, i.e., in singletons, the default gesture for a Glottal Width specification is that of a spread glottis, which results in heavy aspiration in the phonemically aspirated series. A further requirement that the Laryngeal node be structurally bipositional accounts for the celebrated syllable-final neutralizations (monopositional coda obstruents necessarily simplify to lax stops, which have no specified Laryngeal structure) as well as for the appearance of raised pitch on vowels following either tense or aspirated obstruents but not laryngeally empty lax ones (Jun (1993).