Word-level prominence and its susceptibility to phrasal prosody: the case of Korean

Eon-Suk Ko

The location or even existence of stress in Korean has been controversial. At the same time, it has been widely assumed that Korean has a phonemic long vowel, allowed in phrase-initial positions. This paper considers these two key issues of Korean word-level prosody anew. It provides evidence for lexical stress in Korean from the tonal pattern of vocative chant, and argues that a long vowel is an acoustic manifestation of stress. Such an analysis yields a simpler and unified account of deaccenting in verbal suffixation and stress shift in compounds than the moraic approach. An acoustic analysis shows that the syllable in the proposed location of stress is realized with longer duration, higher pitch, and greater intensity. The results indicate that the physical realization of stress in Korean is highly susceptible to phrasal prosody, which I suggest as a factor in explaining the inaudible stress syndrome in Korean.