Research

Ohio State Dissertations in Linguistics (OSDL)

Sun-Ah Jun (1993)

The Phonetics and Phonology of Korean Prosody

Advisor: Mary Beckman

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Abstract:

Published as:
Jun, Sun-Ah (1996) The Phonetics and Phonology of Korean Prosody: intonational phonology and prosodic structure, Garland Publishing Inc., New York : NY.
ISBN 0-8153-2558-4

Prosody is the pattern of intonation and rhythm that makes speech coherent. It is structured into a hierarchy of constituents such as intontional phrases at the large end and syllables at the other. Prosody Phonology is a theory that says this prosodic structure is also the determinant of phonological rule domains. This dissertations is an account of prosodic structure of Korean relating the intonational pattern to the prosodic structure. The prosodic structure proposed by Prosodic Phonologists (Selkirk 1984; Nespor and Vogel 1986; Hayes 1989) is in contrast with my proposal in that they define a prosodic unit mainly based on syntactic information. The importance of the intonation pattern in the prosodc unit formation is also suggested by others such as Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988).

Based on the intonational pattern of an utterance, Korean has an Intonation Phrase and an Accentual Phrase. The Intonational Phrase in my model is the same level as the Intonatinal Phrase proposed by the Prosodic Phonologists and the Accentual Phrase is the same level as their Phjonological Phrase but differ from it in that the Accentual Phrase is defined bu the tonal pattern.

To see if the nonally defined prosodic unit also serves as a domain of segmental phonological rules, I ran several instrumental experiments. The rules I examined were Lenis Stop Voicing, Obstruent Nasalization, Spirantization, and /s/-palatalization. For Post Obstruent Tensing and Vowel Shortening, informal observation is reported.

The results show that these prosodic units defined bu the tonal pattern of an utterance are also the domain of these postlexical phonological rules. It was also shown that these tonally defined domains can better account for the actual data than the prosodic unitsdefined based on the syntactic information. Then I discuss several non-syntactic and non-linguistic factors affecting the tonally defined prosodic phrasing such as speech rate, weight of a phrase, and semantic and pragmatic factors. Finally, I propose a syntactic constraint on the phrasing.