Sentence- Final Intonation Contours: Formal Description

As the segmental phonetic output is derived from its underlying form, the phonetic surface of intonation could also be derived from its underlying tone melody. In order to show clearly the phonological processes (in fact, we need more than just phonological processes) involved in the generation of intonational surface, we need to formalize the description of those processes. This paper firstly examines different types of sentence-final intonation contour in Korean, and then attempt to formalize the intonational behavior of those contours. In this attempt, we will investigate what kinds of linguistic information participate in deciding the shapes of the. contours and what kinds of tonological processes the underlying tone melody undergoes before it takes the surface shape. In this analysis of intonation contours, we focus on the linguistic structure rather than the acoustic property, adopting just two tones L and H as phonological tones, with four phonetic pitches.