On the Relation between Phonetics and Phonology

( Woo Hyeok Chang ) 경희대학교 언어연구소 2012 언어연구 Vol.29 No.1

Chang Woohyeok. 2012, On the Relation between Phonetics and Phonology, Linguistic Research 29(1), 127-156. This study examines the nature of the relationship between phonology and phonetics and advocates a modular view in which there is a principled mapping between phonological representations and phonetic expressions. In particular, this modular view is advocated by Laboratory Phonology that can be characterized by two beliefs. First, it is believed that there should be a division between phonetics and phonology. Second, there should be a considerable interconnection between them. Contrary to this modular view, other approaches are somewhat radical in that abstract phonological features are not associated with phonetic facts and that phonetics and phonology are integrated into a single module which is all phonetic. In favor of the modular theory, I propose a principle about phonology-phonetics interface: unmarked items display a wider range of phonetic realization but cannot be realized in a more marked way than their marked counterparts, One representative evidence would be that the higher pitch value of a tone compared with other tones has to be a phonological high tone rather than a low tone. Further discussions about phonology-phonetics interface are done with regard to speech perception and production. It is shown that perception and production data are valid when they are used as phonetic evidence to resolve phonological controversies. On the other hand, the P-map hypothesis seems invalid when dealing with some cases where speech production and perception do not match.

On the Relation between Phonetics and Phonology

장우혁 경희대학교 언어정보연구소 2012 언어연구 Vol.29 No.1

This study examines the nature of the relationship between phonology and phonetics and advocates a modular view in which there is a principled mapping between phonological representations and phonetic expressions. In particular, this modular view is advocated by Laboratory Phonology that can be characterized by two beliefs. First, it is believed that there should be a division between phonetics and phonology. Second, there should be a considerable interconnection between them. Contrary to this modular view, other approaches are somewhat radical in that abstract phonological features are not associated with phonetic facts and that phonetics and phonology are integrated into a single module which is all phonetic. In favor of the modular theory, I propose a principle about phonology-phonetics interface: unmarked items display a wider range of phonetic realization but cannot be realized in a more marked way than their marked counterparts. One representative evidence would be that the higher pitch value of a tone compared with other tones has to be a phonological high tone rather than a low tone. Further discussions about phonology-phonetics interface are done with regard to speech perception and production. It is shown that perception and production data are valid when they are used as phonetic evidence to resolve phonological controversies. On the other hand, the P-map hypothesis seems invalid when dealing with some cases where speech production and perception do not match.

The phonetics and phonology of vowel length variation in Korean reduplicated ideophones

Hyung-Soo Kim(김형수) 한국음운론학회 2008 음성·음운·형태론 연구 Vol.14 No.2

  Reduplicated ideophones in Korean present interesting problems in phonetics and phonology of vowel length variation. The vowel in the first syllable is short in the partially reduplicated type, e.g. s?l?l? "gently", but long in the fully reduplicated type, e.g. s?lsal. The long vowel in the corresponding ideophone of the latter type, on the other hand, often appears as short after laryngealized obstruents, e.g. s"?ls"al. In this paper three attempts are made to explain this length variation. The first of these is phonetically based, on the hypothesis that laryngeal onsets influence the duration of the following vowel, while the remaining analyses are based on two independent phonological theories, one making use of the feature [long] for tense and aspirated consonants and the Obligatory Contour Principle and the other the concepts of strength fluxion and the Inertial Development Principle. Although some questions are left for future studies, analyzing this and related problems illuminates many of the skills required of a typical phonetic/phonological analysis: sorting out the data and interpreting its relevance, establishing viable hypotheses using one"s phonetic and phonological knowledge, and integrating them for a plausible explanation.

Language Specific Variations of Domain-initial Strengthening and its Implications on the Phonology-Phonetics Interface : with Particular Reference to English and Hamkyeong Korean

Kim, Sung-A 한국음성과학회 2004 음성과학 Vol.11 No.3

The present study aims to investigate domain-initial strengthening phenomenon, which refers to strengthening of articulatory gestures at the initial positions of prosodic domains. More specifically, this paper presents the result of an experimental study of initial syllables with onset consonants (initial-syllable vowels henceforth) of various prosodic domains in English and Hamkyeong Korean, a pitch accent dialect spoken in the northern part of North Korea. The durations of initial-syllable vowels are compared to those of second vowels in real-word tokens for both languages, controlling both stress and segmental environment. Hamkyeong Korean, like English, tuned out to strengthen the domain-initial consonants. With regard to vowel durations, no significant prosodic effect was found in English. On the other hand, Hamkyeong Korean showed significant differences between the durations of initial and non-initial vowels in the higher prosodic domains. The theoretical implications of the findings are as follows: The potentially universal phenomenon of initial strengthening is shown to be subject to language specific variations in its implementation. More importantly, the distinct phonetics- phonology model (Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1998; Keating, 1990; Cohn, 1993) is better equipped to account for the facts in the present study.

VOT Realization of Object-Initial Stops in English VP

하연희 언어과학회 2019 언어과학연구 Vol.0 No.88

Based on three types of English verbs, this study examines what influence on phonetic realization takes place in the interface between syntactic and phonological structure. The phonetic experiment carried out in this study questions the assertion that syntactic structures between a verb and their following argument (object NP) work, not only in the deep level but the surface one as well, for the phonetic realization of objectinitial stops through VOT (ms) measurement. As a consequence, the assumption is that the deep structure influences phonetic realization to make the discrepancy between syntactic and prosodic structure on surface structure. Through different parameters such as types of a predicate, groups, and subject/object length, this study suggests that mismatch between syntactic constituents and prosodic rule domain is enacted in the early stage of deep structure, as well as in the prosodic mapping in the surface level.

The Use of Phonetic Evidence for the Phonological Controversies : A Case of Leftward Tone Spreading

Kim, Sung-A 서울대학교 어학연구소 2004 語學硏究 Vol.40 No.3

This paper seeks a phonetic assessment of a tonal alternation in Hamkyeong Korean, a yet little studied pitch accent language. The tonal alternation has been analyzed as a leftward tone spreading in previous studies. Central to the analysis in the present study is the claim that tone alternation in Hamkyeong Korean can be better accounted for in terms of phonetic implementation of high tones rather than phonological analysis of leftward tone spreading. In the experiment, Hamkyeong Korean speakers' speech data were pitch tracked and measurement was conducted on fundamental frequency (F0 henceforth) values of pitch peak, pitch trough and intermediate points. Statistical results show that F0 values of the intermediate points result from a linear transition function of F0 values of peak and trough and the temporal distance from the peak. This supports the claim that there is no tone spreading in Hamkyeong Korean and the phenomenon previously considered as a phonological process is a result of phonetic implementation.

Phonetic Approach or Phonological Approach : Syntax-prosody Interface in Seoul Korean

Utsugi, Akira 한국음성과학회 2004 음성과학 Vol.11 No.4

There are two different approaches in studying mapping between syntactic structure and prosody, the 'phonetic approach' and the 'phonological approach'. An experiment to examine which approach is more valid was conducted. In the experiment. syntactically ambiguous Seoul Korean sentences in each of which a noun immediately after an adjective starts with either an H-segment (a segment which triggers the AP-initial H tone) or an L-segment (a segment other than H-segments) were recorded by 3 Seoul Korean speakers. The F0 values in the syllables containing the consonants in question were then measured. The results show that interaction between the segment type and the branching structure is statistically significant. which suggests that it is difficult to use the phonetic approach to generalize the relationship between syntax and prosody. Thus, it is concluded that the phonological approach is more valid.

VOT Realization of Object-Initial Stops in English VP

Yeoun-Hee Ha 언어과학회 2019 언어과학연구 Vol.0 No.88

Based on three types of English verbs, this study examines what influence on phonetic realization takes place in the interface between syntactic and phonological structure. The phonetic experiment carried out in this study questions the assertion that syntactic structures between a verb and their following argument (object NP) work, not only in the deep level but the surface one as well, for the phonetic realization of objectinitial stops through VOT (ms) measurement. As a consequence, the assumption is that the deep structure influences phonetic realization to make the discrepancy between syntactic and prosodic structure on surface structure. Through different parameters such as types of a predicate, groups, and subject/object length, this study suggests that mismatch between syntactic constituents and prosodic rule domain is enacted in the early stage of deep structure, as well as in the prosodic mapping in the surface level.

음성인식을 이용한 음운규칙의 검증에 대한 연구

장태엽(Jang Tae Yeoub) 한국어학회 2002 한국어학 Vol.17 No.-

This study aims to introduce a way of verifying Korean phonological and phonetic processes using Automatic Speech Recognition techniques. It attempts to tackle the problems of the traditional ways in which variability and optionality of various processes are not dealt with properly. There are a few separate stages First, an automatic phone recogniser is constructed. The Hidden Markov Model (HMM) statistical recognition technique is employed to construct a Korean phone recogniser. Second. a target process is selected for verification. In the current study, the well-known Korean lenis stop voicing rule was chosen, as the traditional phonological description of this rule has been found to be problematic. Then the relevant speech data tokens which contain the segments located in the environment of voicing rule application, are selected from a corpus. A relatively large amount of speech recognition corpus is used instead of highly controlled speech data artificially designed for a specific phonetic experiment. Consequently, automatic statistical analyses. rather than intuitive judgment, are also adopted and that performance deterioration caused by inevitable errors of the phone recogniser can be alleviated thanks to the statistical averaging effect. After the recogniser is run on the data tokens. the binary evaluation results (ie., whether the rule has applied or not) are collected and interpreted through statistical parameters. It is revealed that there are many cases of phonetic outputs realised without having been influenced by the rule even though they are subject to the rule application environments. This fact suggests that the Korean lenis stop voicing rule need to be reinvestigated and re-described. Though only one rule has been under consideration in this research, many other phonological rules and phonetic constraints can be verified in the same way. It is especially meaningful that the quantitative method of speech technology can be utilized in verifying linguistic or phonetic phenomena.

음성학에 기반을 둔 국어 음운론 연구의 현황과 전망

이봉원(Bong Won Yi) 한국어학회 2007 한국어학 Vol.37 No.-