A metrical theory of Korean word prosody

Abstract

The location or even the existence of stress in Korean has been controversial. At the same time, it has been widely assumed that Korean has phonemically long vowels, allowed in the phrase-initial position. This article considers these two key issues of Korean word-level prosody anew. I claim that the long vowel in Chonnam and Traditional Seoul dialect is an acoustic manifestation of the metrical head, and show that an analysis based on accent rather than phonological vowel length yields a simpler account of the vowel shortening in verbal suffixation. I propose that in Chonnam and Traditional Seoul, there is a two-syllable left-edge window, where stress falls on the initial syllable if accented and, otherwise, on the second syllable. Acoustic analyses show that duration, pitch, and intensity all have significant effects in predicting the location of metrical head in Chonnam. In Traditional Seoul, however, only duration and second syllable pitch have such effects. I argue that the weaker relics of metrical prominence in Traditional Seoul reflect the historical shift of its prosodic system from lexical to phrasal. Implications of the metrical head on the Accentual Phrase theory of Korean (Jun 1993) are discussed with focus on the interpretation of pitch in Korean phonology.