• 음성과학
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.235-252
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• 2000

The purpose of this study is to characterize the intonational realizations of vocatives in comparison with those of appositives in English statements and questions, and to compare the realizations produced by English native speakers with those of Korean students. Unlike Pierrehumbert(1980), in which the tag expressions do not have pitch accents, Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986) proposed that the vocatives have a special status in tonal alignment and duration and that they form an independent phrase with pitch accent. Our results reinforce Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986): both English native speakers and Korean students realize the vocatives in terms of rising tone, and the appositives in terms of both falling tone in statements and rising tone in questions. Moreover, they pronounced the nouns before vocatives longer than those before appositives. However, native speakers impose the low phrase tone before vocatives in statements and the high tone in questions; whereas, Korean students either put the low phrase tone on pitch contours of both statements and questions, or tend to pause before vocatives, thereby constituting an intonational phrase.

• 음성과학
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• 제8권4호
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• pp.275-288
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• 2001

The sentences with the same surface word order may be realized with the pragmatically different meanings, depending on the contexts under which they could appear. Semantically, their meaning differences have been explained in terms of the different information structures (Steedman 2000), whereas prosodically, they can be explained in terms of the different compositions of intonational components which make their own semantic contributions (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). In other words, the different intonation realizations of the sentences with the same word order reflect the different information structures. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the information structure and the intonational meaning by way of analysing the production of the sentences with ambiguous scopes of the English focus particle 'only'. In contrast to the previous quantitative approaches to the scopes of the focus particle 'only', two independent levels of information structure (Steedman 2000)-theme/rheme, and focus/ background-make it possible to consistently explain the intonational phenomena.

• 음성과학
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.131-145
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• 2004

The informative or important entities in utterances are focused and the focused items are usually accompanied by changes in phonetic manifestation. Phonetic realizations triggered by focus include changes of tonal contours as well as segmental strengthening. Focus in Korean is characterized by new phrase initiation, dephrasing, and initial tone contour with an enlarged pitch range in addition to segmentally lengthened initial segment. Focusing on the prosodic cues which play an important role in delivering the speakers' intention, this study aims to find out what intonational characteristics of Korean focus are realized by English learners of Korean. The English learners are divided into two groups according to their fluency in Korean, and the differences in focus realization between each group are discussed. Furthermore, the phonological and phonetic realizations of focus by English learners of Korean are compared to those by Korean native speakers. The results of this study yields two suggestions for Korean intonation education of L2 learners. First, the comparison between the two speaker groups can give better understanding in how and why the Korean intonation of English speakers is different from that of Koreans. Second, each phonological and phonetic characteristic of focus realization can weigh differently and its realization provides a criterion for evaluation of L2 Korean proficiency.

• 음성과학
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• 제5권2호
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• pp.109-129
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• 1999

A study of boundary tones, which are realized at the final syllable of an Intonational Phrase, is important in that sentential meaning is often differentiated solely by the use of different boundary tones in Korean. The purposes of this paper are three-fold: Firstly, it aims at finding out the different characteristics of boundary tones between designed corpus and natural speech. Secondly, it is to show that gender and dialectal differences are crucial factors in determining different realizations of boundary tones. Finally, this study is to provide a basis for better speech synthesis and speech recognition through the analysis of the morphemes where boundary tones are realized. This study has shown that nine different kinds of boundary tones are realized based on the contextual, gender and dialectal differences. In addition to the boundary tones suggested in Jun (1993), three more boundary toes are introduced: L-%,H-%,LHLH%.