Evidence for accentless words in South Kyungsang Korean

Abstract

Recent studies help to establish Kyungsang Korean as a pitch accent language, which differs from some traditional works that view it as a tone language. The purpose of the current paper is to discuss whether South Kyungsang (SK) Korean has an accentless class of words like other pitch accent languages i.e., Japanese. In an examination of SK words of different length, we maintain that SK Korean has accentless monosyllabic, disyllabic, and trisyllabic words. We hold that SK Korean is not only a pitch accent language but also one that has an accentless class of words.