A Comparative Study on Accentual Patterns between Middle Korean and the Current Jeju Korean

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The study reports that bi- and tri- syllabic nouns in the Jeju dialect of Korean keeps phonetic features of Middle Korean tone types, whereas no relation was found in the mono-syllabic nouns. The experimental result on 104 nouns which classified by following Middle Korean tone types implies the importance of syllable structure in the tonal change. In this study, the accentual patterns of Jeju Korean follows those of Kyungnam dialect of Korean; low tones change into high accentual patterns, high tones into low patterns, and falling tones into high patterns. But the change occurs in the phonetic level, not in the phonology, in which the H accent could be realized as higher F0 and longer duration. This means that the phonological tone patterns change into the phonetic accent in multi-syllable words. In this study, we can find some possible relationship between Jeju Korean and Middle Korean. It implies that Middle Korean was not a real tonal language.