The Acoustic Characteristics of Focus Associated with the Korean Particle' -man'

한국어 특수조사 ‘-만’에 연계된 초점의 음향음성학적 특성

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the phonetic characteristics of the 'focus' phrases associated with the particle '-man' in Korean. The particle '-man' is a bound morpheme which, like other postpositions such as the subject marker '-ka' and the object marker '-lil', the so-called 'case markers' in Korean, typically attaches to a noun (phrase). The semantics of '-man' roughly corresponds to that of only, its counterpart in English, and is thus classified as a 'delimiter' (Yang 1973). It is assumed in this paper that '-man', like only in English, should have a 'focus' associated with it (von Stechow 1991, Rooth 1992). In general, '-man' attached phrases get the focus, but sometimes the association is not clear-cut, especially in the cases of emphatic use of '-man' or when the context strongly favors other phrase as the focus (Choe 1996). In this paper, we compare the phonetic characteristics of the '-man' marked phrases with those to which '-ka'/'-lil' is attached, and conclude that the focused '-man' phrases show higher fundamental frequencies than their equally focused 'case' -marked counterparts. However, when the context clearly forces the focus to fall on phrases other than the '-man' or '-ka'/'-lil' attached ones, there is no meaningful difference in fundamental frequency between the '-man' and '-ka'/'-lil' attached phrases. We also compare the phonetic characteristics of the regular use of '-man' with those of the emphatic '-man'. According to our experiments, the emphatic '-man' does not bring forth its phonetic effects, namely, higher fundamental frequencies, on the' -man' attached words or phrases but rather in various other ways such as higher fundamental frequencies in '-man', lengthening of the following word-initial syllable, or the inclusion of the following word in the same accentual phrase. Finally, it is claimed that '-man' associated focus phenomena, especially the emphatic use of '-man', show some typical acoustic characteristics of the other well-known focus phenomena, namely, wh-interrogatives.