Abstract:

This dissertation investigates the phonetic manifestations of lexical prosodic patterns in Daegu Korean (hereafter DK), which is a sub-dialect of North Kyungsang Korean. This dissertation conducts phonetic studies of the DK lexical prosody from which a phonological analysis may be developed. This dissertation aims to address the question of what kind of prosodic system DK has.

Through two pilot studies, I selected 26 words, and asked DK speakers to produce them in three conditions: target in a carrier sentence, target with a subject marker in the carrier sentence, and target in isolation. I measured the following properties of the vowels: F0 peak, average F0, F0 range, F0 slope, initial F0, final F0, duration, intensity peak and average intensity.

Statistical analysis reported that F0 was the primary phonetic cue which distinguished the four prosodic patterns of disyllabic words. It was shown that duration and intensity were not correlated with F0.

As F0 was found to be the primary acoustic correlate of the lexical prosodic patterns, I looked at initial F0, F0 peak, and final F0 of each vowel to compare F0 patterns across different groups. Comparison of the F0 patterns across various groups revealed the fact that there are a constrained number of pitch patterns over the whole word. Furthermore, it was found that the patterns found in disyllabic words are also mapped onto monosyllabic words with the subject marker, and the patterns found in trisyllabic words are mapped onto disyllabic words with the subject marker. That suggests that a constrained number of pitch patterns are lexically associated with prosodic forms, regardless of the components.

As in previous studies, DK also showed F0 perturbations by pre-vocalic consonants. This study shows that F0 perturbations last throughout the following vowel, which is different from tone languages.

Based on these findings, I propose that DK is a pitch-accent system since F0 was found to be the primary acoustic correlate of prosodic patterns and there are a limited number of lexical pitch patterns that are associated with words of a certain number of syllables. In addition, F0 perturbations by pre-vocalic nasals last throughout the vowel.