earticle

영어

This study examines Koreans’ production of syntactically ambiguous English sentences with the scope of negation and focus adverbs. In the previous study done by Hirschberg and Avesani (1997) English speakers disambiguate scope of negation by varying the phrasing of the ambiguous sentence. Target utterances produced with wide scope rarely contain phrase boundaries, whereas those produced with narrow scope usually exhibit major or minor prosodic phrase boundaries in the middle of the utterances. In the production experiment we conducted to prepare for this paper, Korean subjects produced the same English utterances with prosodic boundaries in the middle of them for both wide and narrow scope contexts. The Korean subjects’ English competence made little difference in this case. In Hirschberg and Avesani’s study (1997) English speakers produce a focus adverb and the focused word with high pitch accents and deaccent all the other words within an utterance in a narrow focus context. In the case of broad focus context, namely, when a VP, not just a word, gets focused, English speakers produce high pitch accents for both the focus adverb and the whole VP. Korean subjects with good English competence produce the same English utterances like English speakers do, whereas Korean subjects with less English competence produce high pitch accents for most content words regardless of focus and information structure.