Korean Linguistics - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2022

This work examines Seoul Korean listeners’ perception of the five Korean sibilants: affricates /c′, c, c^h/ and fricatives /s′, s/. Natural productions of the consonants were manipulated to vary orthogonally along several phonetic parameters relevant to the place/manner contrast ((denti)alveolar fricative vs. (palato)alveolar affricate) and the laryngeal contrast (fortis vs. lenis vs. aspirated). Of particular interest was listeners’ representation of /s/, whose laryngeal status is ambiguous. All manipulated parameters (baseline consonant and vowel affiliation, fundamental frequency at vowel onset, frication duration, and aspiration duration) influenced categorization, with consonant and vowel spectral information playing the primary role in distinguishing most sibilants. However, f0, a laryngeal cue, trumped place and manner cues in affricate vs. fricative classification, highlighting the increasing importance of f0 in Korean segmental phonology.

This study aims to identify the acoustic and perceptual properties that contribute to identifying the meaning of Korean sentences that are ambiguous between wh-question and yes-no question readings. While in most cases the Accentual Phrase (AP) tonal pattern (Jun 1993) differs between the two question readings, there are cases where the two readings are predicted to have the same AP tonal pattern. However, our experimental results indicate that even in those cases a typical AP tonal contrast between the two question interpretations, i.e. the presence vs. absence of the tone in the syllable that immediately follows the wh-word, is observed in production and plays a meaningful role in perception. The results suggest that there is a production and processing strategy to utilize a consistent contrast in accentual phrasing between the two types of questions for disambiguation.

This study examines discourse functions of Korean ‘yes’ words from an interactional perspective based on naturally-occurring conversation data. Tokens of yey, ney, ey, ung, um, and e in Korean are widely recognized as affirmative responses. A close examination of these tokens, however, reveals wide-ranging interactional functions through which speakers express active engagement, share information, negotiate meaning, and maintain discourse coherence. The present study identifies a total of fifteen discourse-pragmatic functions of Korean ‘yes’ words: (1) affirmative answer, (2) confirmation, (3) acceptance, (4) agreement, (5) answer to summons, (6) acknowledgement, (7) change-of-state, (8) change-of-activity, (9) response solicitation, (10) reinforcement, (11) other initiation of repair, (12) closing of phone call, (13) continuer, (14) proposal to discontinue the on-going action for the sake of a larger course of action, and (15) arguably hesitation marker. This study demonstrates that the interactional approach enables the discovery of varied discourse functions of a type of linguistic items, which may not be readily available in dictionaries or grammar reference guides.

This paper analyzes how vendors and customers in Korean marketplaces use three distinct levels of addressee honorifics: the deferential ‑ style, the polite ‑yo style and the so-called panmal ‘half speech’ style. The frequencies of these forms to some extent pattern with the relative ages of the participants; for example, vendors are more likely to use panmal towards customers who are relatively younger. However, the majority of interactions feature dynamic variation between different styles, which cannot be adequately explained by relative age. Rather, we see that participants use ‑ style and ‑yo to index that they are speaking in their prescribed roles as “vendors” or “customers”. Meanwhile, panmal was found to index two main forms of social meaning. It was used to mark stages of the interaction that were conversational, playful, or intimate, but also when speakers strategically indexed their authority or power as they tried to take the upper hand in price negotiations. This authoritative use of panmal was accompanied by non-verbal behaviors such as large body postures, high chin positions and the withholding of gaze and bodily orientation. The paper contributes towards a growing body of research adopting an indexical approach to the use of honorifics, and demonstrates the importance of including analysis of multimodal features alongside the honorific forms themselves.