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Chapter 8 - The Phonology and Phonetics of Korean Stop Laryngeal Contrasts

from Part II - Phonetics and Phonology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2022

By
Yoonjung Kang ,
Jessamyn Schertz  and
Sungwoo Han
Edited by
Sungdai Cho  and
John Whitman
Sungdai Cho
Affiliation:
Binghamton University, State University of New York
John Whitman
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
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Summary

Chapter 8 examines the typologically rare three-way laryngeal contrast found in Korean. As also noted in Chapter 2, the manner contrasts in the Korean obstruent inventory have been the point of departure for many descriptive and theoretical contributions to the typology of laryngeal contrasts and related issues, such as feature theory. More recently, a diachronic change characterized by the redistribution of cue weights from the consonantal to the vocalic portion of the signal, mirroring the common historical process of tonogenesis, has sparked renewed interest in the Korean laryngeal contrasts. The opportunity to observe such a change in vivo, and to compare its progression across different dialects, provides an ideal testing ground for theories of sound change. This chapter provides a review of the literature on the phonetic and phonological characterizations of the stop-laryngeal contrast, as well as a survey of dialectal and diachronic variation in its phonetic realization. The chapter closes with an apparent-time study documenting dialectal variation and change in the use of three acoustic cues to the contrast (VOT, f0, and H1-H2) in three dialects of Korean.

Keywords

laryngeal contrastsVOTf0H1-H2dialectssound changecue weightingtonogenesis
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Korean Linguistics , pp. 215 - 247
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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