The Prosody of Questions in Korean Conversation
한경임 · 2003
For this paper, I examined a corpus of 64 wh- and yes-no questions, both positive and negative, from natural discourse. I found that the focus of the question turned out to be marked primarily with some version of H* in accordance with predictions from the literature while the topic was marked with some variant of L*, contrary to literature predictions. As for sentence-final intonation, whereas yes-no questions conformed to the traditional description, wh- questions did not. This is probably due to the fact that while the question particle in yes-no questions serves as a focus with no other competitor to mark interrogativity, wh-questions contain two competing interrogativity markers.