A Comparative Study on Intonation between Korean, French and English: a ToBI approach

Intonation is very difficult to describe and it is furthermore difficult to compare intonation between different languages because of their differences of intonation systems. This paper aims to compare some intonation phenomena between Korean, French and English. In this paper I will refer to ToBI (the Tone and Break Indices) which is a prosodic transcription model proposed originally by Pierrehumbert (1980) as a description tool. In the first part, I will summarize different ToBI systems, namely, K-ToBI (Korean ToBI), F-ToBI (French ToBI) and ToBI itself (English ToBI) in order to compare the differences of three languages within prosody. In the second part, I will analyze some tokens registered by Korean, French and American in different languages to show the difficulties of learning other languages and to find the prosodic cues to pronounce correctly other languages. The point of comparison in this study is the Accentual Phrase (AP) in Korean and in French and the intermediate phrase (ip) in English, which I will call ' subject phrase ' in this study for convenience.