• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.3
• /
• pp.109-125
• /
• 2000

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the intonational meaning of various sentences based on the English Intonational Phonology, and to show the superiority of Intonational Phonology in explaining the intonational meanings in comparison with the other existing intonational theories. The American structuralists and British schools which attempt to describe the intonation in terms of 'levels' and 'configurations' respectively, analyze intonational meaning from a holistic perspective in which an utterance cannot be divided into smaller parts. On the other hand, Intonational Phonology considers English intonation as composed of a series of High and Low tones, and as a result, intonational meaning is interpreted compositionally as sets of H and L. In this paper, the phonological relations between intonation and its meaning from the compositions of pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones which consist of an intonational tune are discussed.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.6
• /
• pp.119-143
• /
• 1999

In this paper, the development of English Intonational Phonology is introduced. The existing representation systems of intonation are largely divided into the American structuralist school and the British school, which describe intonation by means of 'levels' and 'configurations' respectively. Both representation systems have some theory-internal problems, however. As for the American school, there is no way to represent pitches much lower than the reference line, while the system of intonation in the British school is limited in that intonation is described in a phonetic impressionistic way rather than from a phonological perspective. Intonational Phonology, a real phonological approach, which has grown out of the basic assumptions of autosegmental-metrical(AM) theory has been suggested by Pierrehumbert(1980). In her approach, an intonational tune is made up of one or more pitch accents, followed by an obligatory phrase accent and an obligatory boundary tone, and interestingly 22 combinations are possible. Intonational Phonology has been revised from Beckman & Pierrehumbert(1986) in developing ToBI(Tones & Break Indices), a proposed standard for labelling prosodic features of digital speech databases in English.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2002.11a
• /
• pp.86-89
• /
• 2002

According to Pierrehumbert (1980), two level tones - H and L - are enough in representing intonation of intonational languages. But in Korean, high fall and low fall boundary tones, both of which must be represented as HL％ in intonational phonology as in Jun (1993, 1999), are distinct not only acoustically but also functionally. The same is true in the case of high level and mid level boundary tones, which must be represented as H％ in intonational phonology. In this paper, I conducted two identification tests to provide crucial evidence that H and L are not enough in intonational phonology. The results of the identification tests show that categorical perception occur between high level and low level as well as between high fall and low fall. Based on this fact and the results of the acoustic analyses in Lee (1999, 2000), I strongly propose to adopt one more level tone - M - to represent Korean boundary tones.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.6
• /
• pp.55-82
• /
• 1999

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the acoustic characteristics of the Korean accusative marker {-lil} which functions as a discourse marker in discourse. Generally, in written texts or read speeches, it is seldom omitted and it certainly seems to serve a grammatical function. But in ordinary discourse, speakers do not use it in many cases. That is, the environments speakers use {-lil} differ from those they do not. According to the semantic interpretations, {-lil} functions as a pragmatic factor and adds to the meaning of the object in an utterance. In this paper, by comparing the acoustic characteristics of the utterances that contain the marker {-lil} with those of utterances that do not, especially based on Korean Intonational Phonology, we will demonstrate that the Korean accusative marker {-lil} shows clearly the acoustic characteristics related to the pragmatic factors which reflect speakers' special intention.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.7 no.2
• /
• pp.97-112
• /
• 2000

This study examines how both English native speakers and Korean speakers realize the intonational tunes of English sentences when a sentence has two different meanings, through comparison of the utterances of the two groups of speakers. The results indicate that the English native speakers realize the difference in the meanings of given sentences in terms of differences in the boundary tones, as predicted in Pierrehumbert(1980) and Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg(l990), according to whom intonation is composed of a series of pitch accents, phrase tones, and boundary tones, and the meaning of a given sentence is delivered by the composition of the individual meanings of each component. The Korean speakers, however, fail to realize the difference in meaning with its boundary tones. Rather, they realize it by the number or positions of pitch accents and paralinguistic cues such as emotions and gestures. The Korean speakers, unlike the Americans, emphasize subject in sentences.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.10 no.2
• /
• pp.319-338
• /
• 2003

The aim of this paper is to examine the sentence final tonal patterns of English wh-questions through phonetic experiments, based on Intonational Phonology, and to explain the meaning of the final phrase tones of English wh-questions. Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) suggested that it is pitch accents rather than boundary tones which play a crucial role in the meaning of a sentence, and that most of the general questions have H-H% tonal patterns in the sentence final. However, they could not explain why wh-questions had final falling tonal patterns (L-L%). While Bartels (1999) suggested that L phrase tone has the meaning of 'ASSERTION' and it could be applied to the explanation of the meaning of wh-questions' final tonal patterns. However, her suggestions are only theoretical explanation without any experimental support. In this paper, based on Bartels (1999), the data was classified into the following three classes: 1) echo wh-questions, 2) reference questions, and 3) common wh-questions. Using this data, a production test by three English native speakers was conducted. The results show that reference questions and common wh-questions have L phrase tones in the sentence final at a high rate, and echo wh-questions have H phrase tones in the sentence final at a high rate.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2 no.1
• /
• pp.33-39
• /
• 2010

This study investigates the effect of pitch range reset in Korean listeners' processing of syntactically ambiguous participle structures. Unlike Japanese and English,in Korean, the downtrend or the reset of pitch range does not consistently differentiate Accentual Phrases (AP), a lower level of phrasing, from Intonational Phrases (IP), a higher level of phrasing. Therefore, we explore Korean listeners' comprehension patterns for syntactically ambiguous speech strings varying in 1) the relative height of F0 peaks across prosodic units, and 2) the types of prosodic phrasing, to see whether pitch range reset informs the recovery of syntactic structure even though it is not reflected in the intonational hierarchy in Korean. The results show that the hierarchical level of prosodic phrasing affects the parsing pattern of syntactic ambiguity. The pitch range reset also cued the location of syntactic boundaries, but this effect was confined to phrases across AP.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.1 no.2
• /
• pp.119-128
• /
• 2009

Many researchers have argued about the relationship between information structure and intonation. Their results can be summarized in three main points: the intonation of topic and focus in English information structures is implemented as i) a pitch accent, ii) a tune (a pitch accent + (an) edge tone(s)), or iii) a boundary tone. The purpose of this paper is to study various intonational patterns of topic and focus in English information structures, using natural conversations. In this paper, the types of topics and foci are divided, based on contrastiveness. The topics are classified as five non-contrastive and four contrastive topics. The foci are classified as neutral focus, informational focus, and contrastive focus. The results show that the intonation of the topic in English information structures is mainly implemented as a pitch accent, except for the type of the pronoun topic (Lp) which is not implemented as a pitch accent or a tune. However, the intonation of the focus is implemented as a tune in the neutral focus (Fn) and as a pitch accent or a tune in the informational focus (Fi) and the contrastive focus (Fe). In our discussion and conclusion, we suggest that it is not always true that for the meaning of contrast, the topic or the focus is represented as a $L+H^{\ast}$ pitch accent, which has been the main contrastive intonation from earlier studies.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.57
• /
• pp.123-137
• /
• 2006

This paper aims to propose a method of detecting irregular pronunciations for Korean POI data adopting the notion of the Prosodic Word based on the Prosodic Phonology (Selkirk 1984, Nespor and Vogel 1986) and Intonational Phonology (Jun 1996). In order to show the performance of the proposed method, the detection experiment was conducted on the 250,000 POI data. When all the data were trained, 99.99% of the exceptional prosodic words were detected, which shows the stability of the system. The results show that similar ratio of exceptional prosodic words (22.4% on average) were detected on each stage where a certain amount of the training data were added. Being intended to be an example of an interdisciplinary study of linguistics and computer science, this study will, on the one hand, provide an understanding of Korean language from the phonological point of view, and, on the other hand, enable a systematic development of a multiple pronunciation lexicon for Korean TTS or ASR systems of high performance.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.46
• /
• pp.13-24
• /
• 2003

This experimental study shows that, in reading of the English isolated words that are enumerated, the releasing of the word-final stop is employed for signaling enumeration in company with the well-known intonational pattern for it. Furthermore, this study tries to find the aspects of the releasing of the stops in the word-final positions, focusing on the association of the stop releasing/nonreleasing with i) the POA (Place of Articulation) distinction of the word-final stop, ii) the various qualities of the vowel before the final stop, and iii) the voice distinction of the stop in the word-final position.