The Roles of Prosodic Boundary Tones in Korean Morphosyntax and Their Pragmatic Meanings
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2023
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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With the evolution of the Korean language and the increasing popularity of its study worldwide, its grammatical and lexical features have received increasing attention. However, one of the prosodic features, which is boundary tones, has been largely overlooked in the previous literature. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the roles of boundary tones in the relationships between Korean morphosyntax and pragmatic meanings, focusing on Korean interrogatives and their differences across gender. Correspondingly, Korean interrogatives were collected from large-scale speech corpus (naturally occurring conversation) and broadcast media data (media talk). Thereafter, mixed methods combining acoustic, statistical, and qualitative analyses were conducted on them. The results of multigroup path analysis showed the following: 1) statistically significant direct effects of sentence-ending suffixes, boundary tones, interrogative types, and speakers’ communicative intentions; 2) a statistically significant mediation effect of boundary tones; 3) a statistically significant serial mediation effect of boundary tones and interrogative types; 4) a statistically significant difference in the direct effects of boundary tones on interrogative types across gender; 5) no statistically significant difference in the mediation effect of boundary tones across gender; and 6) no statistically significant difference in the serial mediation effect across gender. Additionally, qualitative corpus analysis was conducted, and the linguistic patterns that were revealed showed that Korean speakers frequently use certain sentence-ending suffixes in general interrogatives to deliver direct communicative intention with H-final boundary tones while often applying specific sentence-ending suffixes in confirmation interrogatives to deliver indirect communicative intentions with L-final boundary tones. In addition, the gender-based linguistic patterns indicated that the frequently used interrogative types with -e/a(yo) and -lkka(yo) differ across gender, and -ci(yo) with H- or L-final boundary tones are often deployed for requesting confirmation among males and requesting agreement among females, respectively. Furthermore, subtle differences in the nuances of sub-boundary tones were also found. Overall, this study fills the research gap by demonstrating the roles of boundary tones and their gender-based linguistic variation, and yield methodological implications for linguistic research. However, additional work is needed for a better understanding of boundary tones in combination with other variables and from a diachronic perspective.
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