Phonetic and phonological markers of contrastive focus in Korean

Abstract

Cross-linguistically, focus is often cued by suprasegmental features and changes in phrasing. In this paper, phonetic and phonological markers of contrastive focus in Korean are investigated. We find that, as a phonological marker, focus initiates an accentual phrase (AP), and tends to, but does not always, include the following words in the same AP. But regardless of whether the post-focus sequence is dephrased or not, there is a significant expansion of the focused peak compared to the peak on the following words, thus achieving the perceptual goal of focus: prominence of the focused word relative to the following items. As a phonetic marker, a focused AP has extra-strengthening on its left edge, and the sequence before and after focus tends to be shorter than that in a neutral sentence.