The Interaction of Accent and wh-intonation in Korean and Japanese

Abstract

This paper investigates the phonetic implementations of wh-intonation with respect to lexical pitch accents in South Kyeongsang Korean, Tokyo Japanese and Fukuoka Japanese. It is demonstrated that wh-intonation in Tokyo Japanese compresses the F0 range of lexical accents inside the domain. On the other hand, the accents of the material inside the wh-domain are deleted completely in South Kyeongsang Korean and Fukuoka Japanese. Also, it is revealed that the implementation of prosodic scope marking is determined by the lexical pitch accent of the wh-phrase: pitch compression triggered by a falling tone and a high plateau triggered by a rising tone. Based on the empirical observations above, a typological generalization regarding wh-intonation in the three languages is provided.