14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


A Prosodic Analysis on the Korean Subjective Particles with Respect to the Discourse Function

Cheol-Jae Seong (1), Yoonkyoung Song (2), Yoon-Shin Kim (2), Meeyoung Kim (3)

(1) Dept. of Linguistics, Chungnam Nat'l Univ., Korea
(2) Dept. of Linguistics, Seoul National Univ., Korea
(3) The National Academy of Korean Language, Korea

This study aims to describe a prosodic pattern on the Korean subjective particles with respect to their discourse function. 4 kinds of Korean subjective particles were mainly investigated with reference to sentential location, grammatical relations which can precede or follow the word including subjective particles, and prosodic phrasing.
   F0 and energy were gradually diminished as the particles moved down to the sentential final position. ‘Ga’ particle, which has been potentially regarded as having sort of grammatical focusing function, solely seems to show relatively higher F0 in sentential medial in discourse. At sentential medial position, when words including ‘ga, eun, and neun’ particles were preceded by adverbials, the acoustic variables of particles tend to be diminished by some ratio in comparison with the mean value.
   The duration of particles can vary with respect to style variation and especially that it tends to diminish from 150 basic, 50 separate, and finally 50 discourse successively. And there's some specific phenomenon that prosodic phrasing itself was relatively easily taken place after ‘eun’ and ‘neun’ particles.
   Finally, we tried to catch the prosodic characteristics of interword position in which a specific subjective particle was intervened can be captured by duration and Fo fluctuation governing successive 3 syllables within which boundary can be located.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Seong, Cheol-Jae / Song, Yoonkyoung / Kim, Yoon-Shin / Kim, Meeyoung (1999): "A prosodic analysis on the Korean subjective particles with respect to the discourse function", In ICPhS-14, 1495-1498.