• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.119-132
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to investigate the intonation of Korean speakers in English sentence adverbials. The intonation of English sentence adverbials is realized by its syntactic and semantic meaning. Many Korean speakers realize falling or stylized high-rising intonation instead of fall-rising in attitudinal adverbials. In addition, Korean students don't realize deaccenting in likelihood adverbials. These results suggest that the intonation patterns in current English textbooks are not sufficient for English intonation education at school.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.133-148
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• 2001

Focus and information structure are closely related with the distribution of pitch accents. A focused word conveys new information and bears a pitch accent. A content word can usually get a pitch accent, but it can be deaccented if it is mentioned earlier in the discourse. In this paper, we test how English native speakers and Korean learners of English realize pitch accents according to focus and information structure of a sentence. The production experiment shows that English native speakers give a pitch accent to narrow-focused items, deaccenting all the other items of the sentence. For VP broad focus, native speakers give a pitch accent either to both the verb and its complement or to the complement only. On the other hand, it is found that Koreans give pitch accents to most content words regardless of focus and information structure. Moreover, the perception experiment confirms that Koreans' intonation patterns, which are not appropriate in terms of focus and information structure, may jeopardize listeners' comprehension. This paper shows that Korean speakers have little knowledge about focus and information structure for intonational realization, and that such notions should be applied to teaching of English intonation.

• MALSORI
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• no.42
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• pp.25-36
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• 2001

Stress assignment has been much discussed in the literature on English compound nouns. The general view of the stress pattern of English compound nouns is that a main stress falls on the first element and a secondary stress on the second element; however, a stress pattern is often employed that provides counterevidence to the traditional pedagogical approach. A new idea is suggested by Ladd(1984) that 'compound stress represents the deaccenting of the head of the compound.' Recent studies show that initial stressing does not indicate compounds and syntactic phrases are not always characterized by final stressing. In his pilot test Pennanen comments on the frequent variation of stress patterns on individual items, on the basis of which Bauer confirms Pennanen's results with different informants. This paper is an attempt to justify Bauer's analysis with the same data as Bauer's and different subjects. It turns out that the competences of native-speaker informants do not rovide clear-cut answers. Some factors should be taken into account in assigning appropirate stress to compound nouns.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.187-209
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• 2003

In this paper, we examine if the lexical information of the verb and its noun object affects the pitch accent patterns of the verb phrase focus. Three types of verb-object combinations with different semantic weights are discussed: when the verbs have optional direct objects, when the objects have the greater semantic weight relative to verbs, and when the verbs and the objects have equal semantic weight. Argument-structure-based works note that the pitch accent location in a focused phrase is closely related to the argument structure and contextual information. For example, it has been argued that contextually new noun objects receive accent while given noun objects don't. Contrary to nouns, verbs can be accented or not in verb phrase focus regardless of whether they are given information or new information (Selkirk 1984, 1992). However, the production experiment in this paper shows that the accenting of verbs is not fully optional, but influenced by the lexical semantic information of the verbs. The accenting of noun objects with given information is possible and the deaccenting of new noun objects also occurs depending on the lexical information of the noun objects. The results demonstrate that in addition to argument structure and information by means of context sentences, the lexical semantic information of words influences the pitch accent location in focused phrase.