A Study of the Anti-Cyclicity in the Derivational Operation of the Informal Style Constructions in the Hearer-Oriented Honorific System

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show that the types of sentences in Korean may be determined not only by the syntactic information but also by the phonological information, especially the prosody structure. In the informal style constructions in the Hearer-oriented Honorific System, we conducted phonetic experiments to prove this phenome- non. As a result, it is observed that the types of sentences can be distinguished by intonation. Since the sentence type of Korean is determined at the end of the sentence, it can be confirmed that each sentence type is divided according to IP boundary tones. Our observation is significant because it is an example of the anti-cyclicity of the derivational operation in generative grammar. This does not mean, however, that all types of sentences will be related to anti- cyclicity.