Branching and phrasing in Seoul Korean

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the structural composition, the phrasing and duration and pitch range in Korean utterances. Previous linguistic models (Selkirk, 1986) predict that the syntactically left branching (LB) and right branching (RB) structures should correspond to different phrasings, which according to previous phonological models (Jun, 1993, 1995) should be indicated by the presence of rises in fundamental frequency. Speakers were instructed to produce syntactically ambiguous phrases in a frame which highlighted the ambiguity. The experiment indicates that LB and RB cases were collapsed together resulting in the same phrasing. Even though LB and RB structures usually exhibited the same phrasing, speakers did show differences in pitch range and duration which distinguished left from right branching structures. Initial words in RB cases were longer and had a relatively larger pitch range than RB cases. Such effects have also been found as a correlate of focus. Thus speakers tend to express structural properties of utterances by means of phonetic differences in relative peak F0 height and duration, apart from differences in phrasing.