The Boundary Tones in Korean Intonational Phrases

한국어 억양구의 경계톤

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%.