|
KMID : 0917520080150020007
|
|
Journal of Speech Sciences
2008 Volume.15 No. 2 p.7 ~ p.19
|
|
|
Prosody and Information Structure: Phonetic Realizations of Focus and Topic in Korean
|
|
Oh Mi-Ra
|
|
|
Abstract
|
|
|
|
Information structure can be conveyed by prosodic structure (Poser 1984 for Japanese; Inkelas and Leben 1990 for Hausa; Cho 1990 for Korean; Hayes and Lahiri 1991 for Bengali; Selkirk and Shen 1990 for Shanghai Chinese). Different subfields of linguistics and different theoretical perspectives suggest many distinct types of information structure: topic vs. comment, focus vs. background. old vs. new information, etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate phonetic realizations of focus and topic among these information structures in Korean. For this purpose, we conduct a phonetic experiment where we examine duration, pitch and dephrasing in focus and topic structures. We make four findings through this study. First, duration of ’nun’ varies depending on the information structure of the following constituent. Second, the degree of accentual phrase-initial rising is larger in contrastive topic and focused phrases than in neutral phrases. Third, a contrastive topic phrase always constitutes an Intonation Phrase on its own. Fourth, dephrasing occurs variously depending on gender and the number of the syllables within a phrase.
|
|
|
KEYWORD
|
|
|
intonation, K-ToBI, focus, topic, contrastive
|
|
|
FullTexts / Linksout information
|
|
|
|
|
|
Listed journal information
|
|
|
|
|