18 - On a gestural account of lenis stop voicing in Korean: comments on Jun

Summary

Introduction

As well as providing interesting data on the phonetic characteristics of Korean, and building on her previous work investigating prosodically based variation in the production of Korean stops (e.g. Jun, 1990), Jun's paper addresses issues which are at the heart of laboratory phonology. The point of departure for this study is previous work (by Jun herself and others) showing that the realization of lenis stops in Korean is subject to word- and higher-level prosodic conditioning. Word-initially, lenis stops are produced with a glottal opening and closing gesture, word-medially (and intervocalically) they are produced as voiced, and word-finally with only a small glottal opening. However, in casual connected speech, these word-level constraints appear to be overridden by a higher level of conditioning based on the Accentual Phrase (henceforth “AP”, defined as a prosodic unit intermediate in size between the prosodic word and the intonational phrase). Word-initial lenis stops are voiced intervocalically within the AP, but voiceless in AP-initial position. This alternation is captured in the AP-conditioned lenis stop voicing rule. In the study described in this paper, Jun focuses on lenis stops which are in word-final position, but which in connected speech are assumed to be resyllabified across an AP boundary, with the result that they are postlexically in AP-initial position. However, despite the fact that they are now in AP-initial position, they are most often realized as voiced, contrary to the lenis stop voicing rule.