Korean Linguistics - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2002

AbstractAmong the stop endings of Middle Chinese entering tone, the alveolar stop -t was consistently changed to -l in Sino-Korean while -p and -k remained the same. In his article in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics, Martin (1997) claims that Sino-Korean coda -l was derived from a liquid of a northwestern dialect of the late Tang and Five dynasties, in which Middle Chinese coda -t was changed to -d > -r. This article, however, points out some problems of Martin's view and attempts to present evidence that Middle Chinese coda -t was already changed to -l in Old Sino-Korean even before the lenition of Middle Chinese alveolar stop endings took place in the northwestern dialects of Tang China. Accordingly, this article claims that Sino-Korean coda -l was not an external change but an internal change.

AbstractThe perception of Korean's three-way voiceless stop contrast depends on the combination of a number of acoustic properties including closure duration, f0, VOT and spectral slope. Production studies indicate that these same properties systematically vary according to a stop's position in the hierarchical prosodic structure of an utterance. This study investigated interactions between prosodic structure and the recognition of tense, lax and aspirated stops by using stimuli that contained stops produced at one position in the prosodic hierarchy cross-spliced into utterances at a different prosodic level. The results of the experiment showed that recognition of tense and aspirated stops remained high regardless of the degree of mismatch between the underlying prosodic position of a segment and the domain into which it was inserted. Misrecognition rates were higher for cross-spliced lax stops, and underlying Utterance and Intonation Phrase initial lax stops spliced into the syllable level were perceived as aspirated by a majority of listeners. These findings are interpreted in terms of Cho & Keating's (2001) study of domain-initial strengthening and the acoustic overlap that is observed between stop manner and prosodic position. These results are taken as preliminary evidence that could support Cho & Keating's (2001) suggestion that prosodically conditioned acoustic differences aid listeners in discerning intended phrasings.

AbstractThe purpose of this investigation is to identify and describe the interlanguage features of American KFL (Korean as a Foreign Language) learners with regard to the communicative act of request. For this study, 50 female KFL learners wereasked to write in Korean what they normally say when they carry out the speech act of request, in twelve different situations. Their Korean responses were compared to those of 50 female native speakers in order to identify deviations and problems, which the American KFL learners wereconfronted with when they try to acquire this particular communicative feature. The study identifies and discusses the pragmalinguistic shortcomings of the KFL learners, comparing the type and frequency of downgraders and the honorifics used by the KFL learners and by the Korean native speakers. The pragmalinguistic differences of the respective groups support the findings by Sohn ( 1986) that Koreans are more hierarchical and collectivistic than Americans, whereas Americans tend to be more egalitarian and individualisticthan Koreans.