The Role of H Tone of an AP in Korean: The Relation Between Prosody and Morphology

Abstract

This paper investigates tonal patterns of the prosodic constituents of an AP and a PWD in Korean and their relation with the morphological/syntactic structure. Specifically, this paper asks the following questions: First, if there are more than one PWD in an AP, how is each PWD specified in terms of tones? Secondly, in case that there is only one PWD in an AP that consists of several morphemes, is there any preference of the association between tones and the morphemes that constitute that PWD? Thirdly, if an AP dominates a PWD and if a PWD contains at least one morpheme of the lexical category, it follows that an AP should contain at least one morpheme of the lexical category. Can this be verified with the experimental data In order to answer these questions, Experiment I and II were conducted with the target material consisting of a stem and suffixes that varied in length. The results of this preliminary test show that as the number of syllables in the target material increases, the more number of an AP tonal pattern occurs in it and as a result, in some cases, an AP consisting of suffixes only may occur.