earticle

영어

This study investigates phonetic characteristics of '-yo' particle in Korean,whose grammatical function is basically similar to the declarative particle '-ta'. The '-yo' particle follows the verb at the end of a sentence and it can be attachedto sentence medial non-verbal elements. Interestingly, the apparent '-yo'duplication is legal only in the presence of sentence-final '-yo'. This conditionleads us to an assumption that the medial '-yo' is linked to the sentence finalparticle at a certain linguistic level. Our main goal is to investigate to whichextent the phonetic characteristics of sentence medial '-yo' particle are comparableto those of the sentence final one. Speech data were collected from 9 femaleinformants in a laboratory setting and our measurements include pitch andtemporal dimensions (e.g., syllable lengthening and pause duration). We found(1) that the two '-yo' particles are phonetically similar to each other in termsof the types of boundary tone associated and the presence of lengthening, and(2) that they differ in the degree of lengthening and pause. Our phonetic resultscan help us understand the '-yo' duplication phenomenon.