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

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


Korean Prosodic Structure and Focus

Mira Oh

Yeojoo Institute of Technology, Korea

There seems to be some relation between meaning and intonation. In particular, that the semantic notion of focus can determine prosodic phrasing is by now well documented. In this paper, the effects of focus on prosodic phrasing, F0, and duration are investigated paying attention not only to the target of focus but also to those constituents that are outside the domain of focus. We find that the constituents preceding and following the focused word tend to be dephrased. Dephrasing does not always cover up to the intonational phrase boundary. Syntactic constituency also plays a role in prosodic phrasing. It was shown that dephrasing caused by focus is a main factor determining F0 and durational difference between focused and neutral sentences.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Oh, Mira (1999): "Korean prosodic structure and focus", In ICPhS-14, 1517-1520.