Korean Linguistics - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2013

This article presents new data on the contrast between the two voiceless coronal fricatives of Korean, variously described as a lenis/fortis or aspirated/fortis contrast. In utterance-initial position, the fricatives were found to differ in centroid frequency; duration of frication, aspiration, and the following vowel; and several aspects of the following vowel onset, including intensity profile, spectral tilt, and F1 onset. The between-fricative differences varied across vowel contexts, however, and spectral differences in the vowel onset especially were more pronounced for /a/ than for /i, ɯ, u/. This disparity led to the hypothesis that cues in the following vowel onset would exert a weaker influence on perception for high vowels than for low vowels. Perception data provided general support for this hypothesis, indicating that while vowel onset cues had the largest impact on perception for both high- and low-vowel stimuli, this influence was weaker for high vowels. Perception was also strongly influenced by aspiration duration, with modest contributions from frication duration and f0 onset. Taken together, these findings suggest that the ‘non-fortis’ fricative is best characterized not in terms of the lenis or aspirated categories for stops, but in terms of a unique representation that is both lenis and aspirated.

This study investigates how Korean adults interpret and identify the referent of a null subject in a narrative text, given different types of topic continuity and person features. We have found that the first-person feature was most accessible in the weak topicality condition in resolving the null subjects, and that the target sentences ending with the first-person modal suffix ‘-lay’ were read and responded to faster, and interpreted more correctly than other types of stimuli involving a third-person modal (‘-tay’) and a person-neutral modal (‘-e’). Furthermore, of the two first-person-specific featured types, the null subjects in the topically weak contexts were processed significantly better than those in the topically strong conditions. It was argued that anaphoric dependency would be formed more discursively than morpho-syntactically in the strong discourse continuity contexts involving no extra processing load due to the shift among multiple eligible candidates. It was also argued that, in the absence of discourse topic assigned strongly to more than one eligible referent in advance, morpho-syntactic cues involved in verb modality are likely to become prominent in the mind of the processor. It is concluded that these main findings support a constraint-based approach, but not the Centering-inspired work.

This study examines the nominal address terms in Korean and Japanese and argues that the notion of ‘Intimacy’ plays a crucial role in choosing an appropriate nominal address term in both languages. In the past several decades, a long list of researchers working in diverse languages have evaluated the validity of the Power and Solidarity semantics proposed by Brown and Gilman (1960), which provided a ground-breaking framework to account for the selection of pronominal address terms in the T-V languages. Building on the Power and Solidarity semantics, we propose to fine-tune it by adding Intimacy as the third dimension crisscrossing the first two well-established dimensions. We take Power and Solidarity as socially prescribed notions while Intimacy is personally defined. We demonstrate how this highly subjective notion dictates and often manipulates the ways the Korean/Japanese speaker selects an appropriate nominal address term. In particular, we argue that the Korean selection of pseudo-kinship terms over the neutral title ssi, or the Japanese use of chan/kun by adult speakers in lieu of the default ‘Last Name+san’, cannot be accounted for without applying Intimacy as a crucial indexing device. Furthermore, we suggest that Intimacy is not an ad hoc dimension specific to Korean and Japanese, but that it is relevant to all languages whether or not a given language has an overt way of encoding it.

This study investigates the role of prescriptivism and the influence of orthographic conventions on the adaptation of English loanwords in Korean. An experiment is conducted in which native speakers of Korean produce on-line adaptations of English nonce words with word-initial clusters of s-plus-stop (/sp-, st-, sk-/). The results show that Korean listeners categorize English voiceless unaspirated stops as Korean tense stops in the absence of corresponding English graphemes, whereas they select Korean aspirated stops when presented with their English spellings (p, t, c/k). This reveals a prominent bias in borrowing toward substitution by the phonetically closest sounds in the recipient language, albeit only when the role of source language orthography is suppressed.