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KMID : 0917520000070030053
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Journal of Speech Sciences
2000 Volume.7 No. 3 p.53 ~ p.68
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On Korean Fricatives
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Kang Kyung-Shim
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Abstract
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Although Korean stops and affricates show a three-way contrast of phonemes into lax, tense and aspirated, Korean fricatives have only two types, so-called ´lax´ and tense. Considering that all the other obstruents maintain a three-way distinction but fricatives, in might be interesting to investigate whether the lax fricatives are relly ´lax´ in their phonetic and phonological realizations, as assumed. From an acoustic analysis, I found that Korean lax fricatives had a heavy aspiration along with a high pitch for the following vowel, being more comparable to the aspirated category. By contrast, their durational properties were found to be short, or lax-like. In other words, Korean lax fricatives are phonetically neither lax nor aspirated, but both. This dual nature of the lax fricatives takes a better account of the fact that why lax fricatives are subject to tensification, but not aspiration phonologically. Is that simply because there is no aspirated fricative in Korean? I suggest that Korean lax fricative undergo tensification because of their being short in duration, and that they are not subject to the aspiration rule because they are indeed aspirated sounds.
Keywords : lax fricative, tense fricative, aspiration, tensification
In sum, Korean fricatives and alveolar stops are found to hae the following characteristics, as in Table t. As seen in Table 5, the tense fricatives have all the same phonetic properties as tense alveolar stops, whereas the lax fricatives show a mixture of lax and aspirated-like chaacteristics. In terms of VOT and Fo, lax fricatives behave like aspirated stops, as their heavy aspiration influences not only the VOT dimension but the Fo onset of the following vowel. However, with respect to duration, lax fricatives exhibit dual properties as both the lax and aspirated series relative to the position in which they occur. That is, the duration properties of /s/ are in line with aspirated stops initially, but with lax ones medially. Although /s/ reflects aspirated-like durational chaacteristics initially, it might be the case that the lax fricative has lax-like durational properties, but that its heavy aspiration might affect the durations to be more compatible with the aspirated series in initial position. On the contray, in medial position, /s/´s total duration is reduced greatly, which in turn causes the following vowel to undergo a compensatory lengthening. Therefore, I hypothesize that the lax fricative is an aspirated consonant by the phonetic criteria of VOT and Fo, but it is a lax terms of the duration parameter.
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