Cross-linguistically, focus is often cued by suprasegmental features and changes in phrasing. In this paper, phonetic and phonological markers of contrastive focus in Korean are investigated. We find that, as a phonological marker, focus initiates an accentual phrase (AP), and tends to, but does not always, include the following words in the same AP. But regardless of whether the post-focus sequence is dephrased or not, there is a significant expansion of the focused peak compared to the peak on the following words, thus achieving the perceptual goal of focus: prominence of the focused word relative to the following items. As a phonetic marker, a focused AP has extra-strengthening on its left edge, and the sequence before and after focus tends to be shorter than that in a neutral sentence.
Cite as: Jun, S.-A., Lee, H.-J. (1998) Phonetic and phonological markers of contrastive focus in Korean. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 1087, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-151
@inproceedings{jun98_icslp,
author={Sun-Ah Jun and Hyuck-Joon Lee},
title={{Phonetic and phonological markers of contrastive focus in Korean}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 1087},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-151}
}