• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.89-108
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• 2002

Deaccentuation' means the phenomenon that the accent on the particular element which deserves to be accented, disappears and loses the property of intonational prominence. Based on some theoretical background, we divided the cases where deaccentuation can be placed into six categories : the first, the case that the words already mentioned are repeated in the context; the second, the case that the element can be recovered anaphorically or situationally; the third, the case that the elements are semantically weightless; the fourth, the case that the meaning of the word is empty; the fifth, the case that the elements are less informative, so that they are easy to predict; the sixth, the case that the elements are located after the focused words. Then we organized the context and the experimental sentences corresponding to each category. The utterances of Korean and English native speakers were recorded and analysed based on the ToBI system and compared to each other, in order to find out that Korean speakers can distinguish the difference within each sentence pair, and produce them with appropriate intonation similar to that of native speakers.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.303-318
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• 2003

This paper attempts to investigate the tonal implementations of English stress clash, arguing that a preceding stress shifts leftward when two lexical stresses conflict across word boundaries or that H* and L* pitch accents are alternatively manifested on the stressed syllables, establishing intonational peak and valley contours. We claim that the H*/L* alternation might be a tonal strategy to avoid stress clash, and that pitch could be solely manipulated to display a rhythmic effect with maintaining lexical stress. In the experiment, we examined two-word combinations whose boundaries involve stress clash, and divided them into two categories. One has the preceding words involving a heavy syllable ahead of stress to guarantee the place for a shifting stress and the other, a light syllable, in which case stress shift is completely prevented. We analyzed the distribution of pitch accents in the word combinations, focusing on the pitch configurations in the cases where stress should not be shifted. Results show that approximately 50% of the stimuli show stress shift in the heavy syllable combinations of the preceding words; the preceding stress is moved leftward within the word. The other 50% and the light syllable combinations show various pitch accents patterns; H* and L* alternation, deaccentuation of either stressed syllable, or L-insertion between two H* pitch accents, etc. We interpret this as a rhythmic effect of tone to avoid stress clash and suggest that a true stress clash would be confined into cases without H*/L* contours.