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Consonants of Korean are devided into two groups at the phonological level : one is the sonorants, i.e. nasals and a liquid, and the other one is the obstruents, i.e. stops, fricatives and affricates. The latter has three-way opposition at the syllable-initial position : unaspirated and non-glottalized (or unaspirated lenis), glottalized (or unaspirated fortis), and aspirated. Among them, the first one presents the ditinction between unvoiced and voiced according to its environment at the surface level or the phonetic representation, although unvoiced/voiced distinction is not phonologically relevant in the consonant system of Korean. A voiced obstruent appears after a sonorant (including a vowel or a semi-vowel as well) and before a vowel at the same time, i.e. in the environment between a sonorant and a vowel. When we examine the verbal inflection of Korean, we notice the initial consonants of inflectional endings immediately after the vowel or liquid stems appear in voiced as the preceding description predicts, but it is not the case with nasal stems, for they appear in glottalized as in the case of obstruent stems. That is to say, in the domain of verbal inflection nasals function as the obstruent, not as the sonorant. For the process of derivation, another domain of the verb morphology, however, initial consonants of succeeding elements immediately after the nasal stems appear in voiced as the preceding description correctly predicts : in this case nasals function as the sonorant just as in the usual phonological process of Korean. The situation of nasal stem verbs in Korean stated above presents the interrelationship between phonological level and morphological level so clearly that it may also contribute to the real understanding of various linguistic levels in general.
