Declarative Intonation in Korean: AN Acoustical Study of F(o) Declination.
Abstract
This dissertation investigates some acoustic features of declarative intonation in standard Korean based on the hypothesis that fundamental frequency (F_0 ) declination can be syntactically determined. In the course of this study, the following major issues are addressed: (i) What is the relation between sentence length and F_0 contours? (ii) Is there any difference in F_0 patterns between male and female speakers? (iii) Is F_0 declination exclusively a surface structure phenomenon? (iv) Are F_0 contours of parentheticals independent from those of the main clause? (v) What is the effect of word order on variations in F_0 ?. Ten subjects (seven male and three female speakers of the Seoul dialect) read sentences with various types of syntactic structure. In order to analyze F _0 declination phenomena, a software program, DoReMi, and an Impulse Audio Digitizer were used with a Macintosh computer. After obtaining the results from the computer, the Visi-Pitch was also used to confirm some F_0 traces. Major results from this research may be summarized as follows: (i) The rate of declination is not affected by the length of the syntactic unit. Particularly, initial and final values are nearly constant in both progressively longer simplex sentences and expanded embedded sentences. (ii) F_0 contours for male and female subjects are strikingly similar except for the different ranges. (iii) The deletion site plays a certain role in the process of F_0 contours, suggesting that declination may be determined at an underlying or abstract level. (iv) As in English, a parenthetical phrase or clause in Korean has a separate F_0 pattern in its own right, and the parenthetical does not perturb the F_0 pattern of the main clause. (v) Sentences with word orders which are used most frequently in discourse have shown the standard pattern of F_0 declination while orders which are used less frequently have unpredictable F _0 patterns in general.
- Publication:
-
Ph.D. Thesis
- Pub Date:
- 1988
- Bibcode:
- 1988PhDT.......125K
- Keywords:
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- Language: Linguistics; Physics: Acoustics