The Tonal Structures and the Locations of the Main Accent of Kyungsang Korean Words

This paper explicitly provides the experimental analyses for the fundamental arguments of Kyungsang (KS) tone. It provides the locations of the main accent in KS words and its basic tonal units. Furthermore through the results it ultimately contributes to the typological categorization of KS Korean tone. That is, the results of the current experimental analysis of the KS words provide us the evidences that KS Korean is a pitch-accent language. In KS Korean only one accent is assigned on a syllable and other syllables are predictable in terms of pitch. The accent type of South Kyungsang Korean is H*+L with two register tones (H and L). North Kyungsang Korean has two types of accent L+H* and H*. Even though Korea is a small country, there exist several different dialects in the country. Among those dialects especially Southeastern dialects of Korean (South and North Kyungsang Koreans), unlike other dialects, show lexical contrast patterns based on pitch (f0). In this paper, therefore, we examine this tonal phenomenon in terms of the tone structures and the locations of the main (highest) High tone of the dialects and try to figure out what prosodic type this lexical contrast in tone patterns reflects. Traditional works (Gim 1994, 1998, Lee 1997) claim that Kyungsang (KS) Korean is a tone language. They argue that KS Korean has three distinctive tones as High (H), Mid (M) and Low (L) and these tones are assigned on each syllable in a word. The height of non-high-toned syllables in KS Korean words is unpredictable. Therefore, they insist that KS Korean is a tone language. However, in a pitch-accent language like Japanese, an accent is assigned on only one syllable or mora in a word and the height of the other non- accented syllables is decided by rules (McCawley 1970, 1978). The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate the location of the main (highest) H in KS words and to decide whether the High tone in KS words function as in tone languages or as in pitch accent languages. The typological category of KS dialect is examined through the current experimental study. Now let us consider some example words having multiple High tones. In KS Korean, some words have H tones in adjacent syllables. Both native and loanwords are assumed to have the same tonal characteristics (SKK: South Kyungsang Korean, NKK: North Kyungsang Korean).