The prosodic characters of particles in Korean -- focusing on the read speech --

한국어 조사의 운율적 특성 - 낭독체 문장을 중심으로-

The prosodic characteristics of Korean particles in read speech were examined in this paper based on K-ToBI labeling system in order to see whether they are prosodically weak form like functions words in English. Acoustic measurements and statistical analysis were done focusing on the distribution of particles over a variety of prosodic positions, prosodic positional effects on the phonetic realization of particles, and acoustic strength of particles compared to those of their surrounding syllables. The panicles were distributed rather equally over all 4 prosodic positions with the highest frequency at IP-medial/AP-final position and the lowest at IP-medial/AP-medial position except that topic marker 'Un/nUn' showed preference for IP-final/AP-final position. There was a significant prosodic positional effect on the duration and F0 of the particles. Duration was the longest at IP-final/AP-final position and interestingly, at IP-medial/AP-medial position while F0 was the highest at IP-final/AP-medial Position as expected. The comparison of the acoustic properties of the particles with those of neighbor syllables showed that duration was generally significantly longer and energy also showed larger values, if not significant, in particles suggesting that the particles in Korean are not prosodically weaker like function words in English.