Browsing by Subject "Korean language"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Prosodically driven phonetic properties in the production and perception of spoken Korean(2009-08) Jang, Mi; Sussman, Harvey M.; Diehl, Randy L.The focus of this study was to explore how prosodic position and word type affect the phonetic structure and resulting perceptual identification of Korean stops and fricatives. When there is less contextual information, speakers tend to produce clearer speech. For example, consonants at the beginning of prosodic domains, such as syllables, words or phrases, are known to be more clearly articulated and distinguishable than later-occurring consonants. However, it is not yet clear whether the prosodically conditioned realizations of a segment are perceptually distinctive in continuous speech. In addition, there are few studies examining whether the properties of prosodic domain-initial segments are affected by the information content of words (real vs. nonsense words). The acoustic properties of stops and fricatives were compared across IP, PP and Wd-initial positions both in real and nonsense words. It was found that segments in the higher prosodic domain-initial positions showed enhanced durational properties compared to the lower prosodic domain-initial positions. However, the enhancing strategies were different among phonation types. Relative to lenis and aspirated stops, and lenis fricatives, tense stops and fricatives showed less consistent variation as a function of prosodic position and word type. In the perception study, the identification error rates and reaction time for same-spliced CVs were compared to those for cross-spliced CVs. Korean listeners identified the same-spliced CVs more accurately and faster than cross-spliced CVs. In addition, the distinctive acoustic properties of each prosodic domain-initial position were perceptually distinguished by Korean listeners. Due to relatively shorter duration and less distinctive contrast, the target CVs extracted from lower prosodic domain-initial positions caused more confusion in the identification of target segments. In conclusion, this study provides the evidence that speakers modulate their speech clarity depending on information content. By enhancing phonetic properties and phonological contrast, speakers tend to provide perceptual cues for prosodic positions with less contextual information.Item The temporal suffixes in Korean and their interpretations(2007-12) Kim, Jihwan; Beaver, David I., 1966-This report deals with the issue of tense and aspect system in Korean both semantically and syntactically. Previous accounts for tense and aspect in Korean have been based on the assumption that the suffix has a fixed meaning, either temporally or aspectually, and either perfect(ive) or imperfective, and so on. In this report, I argue that the interpretation of the temporal suffix in Korean must be more flexible. The interpretation of the suffix is dependent on the occurrence conditions such as the characteristics of the verbs (or the predicates) and the temporal adverbials. For this claim, I argue how to understand tense and viewpoint aspect in Korean based on ‘twocomponent theory of aspect’ (Smith 1997) along the line of ‘boundedness’ of the grammaticalized aspect (Depraetere 1995) and ‘Event realization’ by Bohnemeyer and Swift (2004): –ess is either past tense or perfective aspect suffix and –nun is a present tense suffix with imperfective aspect meaning, because –nun only occurs with [+dynamic] predicates. Further, I argue how we can reflect the semantic tense and aspect onto the syntactic representation properly. Following Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (1997, 2000), I show how tense and aspect in Korean can be mapped onto the syntactic representation. To treat the temporal adverbials, I follow Thompson (2005) that temporal adverbials are linked to [spec, AspP] position when they play a role as Reference Time (RT). Finally, I argue how the relations of the temporal arguments are syntactically realized in Korean. And –ess is interpreted as perfective aspect when the RT and ST (Speech Time) overlap.Item Two different topic structures in SOV languages(2006-05) Lyu, Hee Young; Green, Lisa J., 1963-The main objective of this thesis is to argue that the different topic and focus readings of Korean nun-marked phrases result from structural differences. Korean nun-marked phrases can receive a topic reading a contrastive topic reading and a contrastive focus reading. The topic and the contrastive readings of nun-phrases have been discussed mainly in semantics and pragmatics literature (Büring 2003, etc.). In this research, contrastive topic has been described as focus with topichood. Syntactic research on topic construction has focused on topic studies in operator-movement (Huang 1984, Han 1998) and topic movement to TopP or FocP whose head is nun (Gill and Tsoulas 2004). These focus-oriented studies and movement analyses do not explain why topic and contrastive topic are syntactically different, and why topic sentences do not show a Weak-Crossover effect which results from operator-movement. I show that topic sentences receive different readings due to structural differences. Pro-drop languages like Korean avoid redundancy and drop a pronoun if the meaning is covered by another argument in the same sentence or by discourse. The meaning difference between a topic reading and a contrastive topic reading occurs because the nun-marked phrase can be either merged (for the topic reading) or scrambled (for the contrastive topic reading). Because merging and scrambling are not operator-movement, Weak-Crossover effects resulting from operator-movement do not exist in Korean topic sentences. Contrastive topic readings are made possible due to scrambling, and are not a result of focus movement, a kind of operator-movement. The structural differences among topic, contrastive topic, and contrastive focus in this analysis may apply to other language data, and it is possible to find parallels between topic phrases in Korean and in other languages. For example, left-dislocated phrases are sentence topics in many languages. The left-dislocated phrases may correspond to merged nun-marked phrases in Korean. Resumptive pronouns, which have the same index as the left-dislocated phrases, may correspond to covert pronoun pro in Korean. Analyzing other language data, we may find some kinds of universality in topic and focus structures.