The accentual pattern and prosody of the Chonnam dialect of Korean

Abstract

This paper examines the pitch accent and intonation patterns of the Chonnam dialect of Korean, spoken in the South Cholla province. The F0 contours show that the Chonnam dialect has two kinds of accentual patterns, low‐high‐low and high‐high‐low, the choice of which is determined by the first segment of a phrase. If the segment has a laryngeal feature of either [+ spread] or [+ constricted], a phrase beginning with the segment gets a h‐h‐l pattern. Otherwise, it gets a l‐h‐l pattern. Cross linguistically, it is well known that aspirated or glottalized segments cause higher F0 at the onset of the following vowel. However, these phonetic facts do not mean that the h‐h‐l pattern is a low‐level product of the physiological effect. Rather, the occurrence of this accent pattern defines a phonological phrase. The F0 contours also suggest that the Chonnam dialect has two more units of prosodic structure above the phonological phrase within an utterance, namely the intermediate phrase and the intonational phrase. An intermediate phrase in Chonnam is characterized as the domain of downstep between phonological phrases. An intonational phrase is characterized by a high or high‐low boundary tone. The data used in this paper are from the dialect spoken in Kwangju, the main city in the Chonnam province.