Analysis of Korean intonation

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1991

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This study is about the structural analysis of Korean intonation. "Intonation" is taken up in its restricted sense, and the scope of the study is limited to everyday conversational speech in the standard dialect of Korean. Since this study is interested in linguistic structure, not in acoustic detail, it thus follows an abstract approach. For representing intonational contours, a two-tone (H and L) analysis is employed, with four accompanying phonetic pitch levels. Through two experiments--a perception test and a production test-it is found that in Korean, accent falls on the phrase-final syllable and is realized as a pitch peak. In addition, it is found that an LH pattern is basic to each intonational phrase (IP). In relation to the internal structure of IP, nucleus movement and final syllable lengthening are discussed. As factors modifying pitch range width, key and register are also examined. Types of intonational contour are classified into two by the position of occurrence in a sentence. For sentence-nonfinal IPs, the basic LH pattern is modified by its structural environment such as pause, syntactic break, etc. For sentence-final IPs, the basic tone melody undergoes modification by various informations such as sentence type, discourse function, affective state, and emphatic stress. Some other factors affecting intonational contour are also investigated. Among them are lexical tone, IP-initial gliding tone, and inter-IP declination. Regarding intonational phrasing, phonetic cues are claimed to be not suitable to demarcate IPs, and purely syntactically determined IP division is illustrated to be insufficient. Semantic approach is also shown to not work very well, either, with Korean. What is more responsible for intonational phrasing in Korean is pragmatic information such as informational prominence and focus. An algorithm is presented to show how to get a correct IP division by using the pragmatic information. In relation to speech rate, another conditioning factor of intonational phrasing, a tone sandhi rule is proposed.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1991.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-134)
Microfiche.
xi, 134 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

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Theses for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (University of Hawaii at Manoa). Linguistics; no. 2683

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Table of Contents

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