The Characteristics of Intonation in Seoul Korean(<Feature Articles>Current Trends in Intonational Research on Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, German and French)

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the characteristics of intonation in Seoul Korean. After briefly reviewing previous studies on Korean accent and intonation, it describes the intonational characteristics of Seoul Korean with respect to intonational structure, accentual phrase, intonational phrase, declination, focus, syntactic structure, the relationship between accentual phrasing and their related phonological alternation, paralinguistic information and prosodic aspects of dialogue. This paper also introduces K-ToBI, a prosodic transcription convention for Seoul Korean. Finally, it identifies the intonation problems Japanese learners of Korean frequently have difficulty mastering.