Prosodic Markers and Morphological Markers in Spoken Korean
Jiyoung Shin · Korean Linguistics · 2017
This paper aims at investigating the prosodic markers and morphological markers in spoken Korean. Prosody, especially intonation, has linguistic and paralinguistic meanings in spoken Korean. As is well-known, prosody plays important role in spoken language: it is hard to determine whether a word(or a eojeol) is realized at the sentence final or non-final position without consulting the prosody. Only an exception is that a word(or eojeol) ends with a typical sentence final ending such as ‘–다, -냐, -라, -자’. Therefore, we can categorize two types of endings in Korean: clause terminal endings and sentence terminal endings. A eojeol with a clause terminal ending, which is categorized as a connective ending in the previous studies, terminates a sentence only with a terminal boundary tone. It does not terminates a sentence with a non-terminal boundary tone. On the other hand, a eojeol with a sentence terminal ending, which is categorized as a terminal ending in the previous studies, always terminates a sentence with a unmarked terminal boundary tone. The unmarked terminal boundary tone depends on the ending types: H% for the interrogative ending (e.g. {-냐), L% for the rests. Marked terminal boundary tone with sentence terminal ending only changes paralinguistic modal meaning of the sentence. It does not change the linguistic category of the sentence type, which is realized with the morphological marker(i.e. sentence terminal ending type). Only paralinguistic modal meaning changes in this case. On the other hand, when a eojeol does not end with a sentence terminal ending, a sentence can close off with terminal boundary tone and cannot close off with non-terminal boundary tone. In this case, terminal boundary tone can have linguistic meaning as well as paralinguistic modal meaning.