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영어

This study is to investigate whether Korean English learners can associate the meanings of questions with their intonational contours. Different tunes convey different meanings with respect to speaker and addressee commitment, degree of assertability and anticipated answers. Various types of English question sentences were selected from a TV drama, and speech of high school students was compared with that of actors to examine whether the meanings of questions are correctly merged with intonational contours. We found that English learners did not properly manifest the intonational contours in questions with respect to their different pragmatic meanings. We assume that this is due to the unidirectional instructions given in class regardless of contexts. Our results further suggest that contexts should be incorporated in teaching intonational contours of questions so that learners can correctly associate the different intonational configurations with their meanings.