Default phrasing and attachment preference in Korean

Abstract

This paper tests the validity of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) (Fodor 1998, 2002) based on production and perception experiments on Korean data. IPH states that attachment of a relative clause (RC) in a sentence with a complex noun phrase is influenced by a default prosodic contour of the structure projected in silent reading. It predicts that speakers of a language who prefer high attachment would produce a prosodic break between the RC and the adjacent noun phrase. Results show that Koreans prefer high attachment of an RC, but they do not produce a larger prosodic break between the RC and the adjacent noun phrase. Instead, the most common default phrasing is to produce each word in the same prosodic unit, an Accentual Phrase. Though this does not support IPH, the perception data show some sensitivity to prosody.