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. 2020 Oct 22;15(10):e0240682.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240682. eCollection 2020.

An apparent-time study of an ongoing sound change in Seoul Korean: A prosodic account

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An apparent-time study of an ongoing sound change in Seoul Korean: A prosodic account

Jiyoun Choi et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

In present-day Seoul Korean, the primary phonetic feature for the lenis-aspirated stop distinction is shifting from VOT to F0. Some previous studies have considered this sound change to be a tonogenesis, whereby the low-level F0 perturbation has developed into tonal features (L for the lenis and H for the aspirated) in the segmental phonology. They, however, have examined the stop distinction only at a phrase- or utterance-initial position. We newly explore the sound change in relation to various prosodic structural factors (position and prominence). Apparent-time production data were recorded from four speaker groups: young female, young male, old female, old male. The way the speakers use VOT versus F0 indeed varies as a function of position and prominence. Crucially, in all groups, VOT is still used for the lenis-aspirated distinction phrase-medially due to the lenis stop voicing. This role of VOT, however, is found only in the non-prominent (unfocused) condition, in which the F0 difference is reduced to a low-level perturbation effect. In the prominent (focused) context in which tones come into play, the role of VOT diminishes, led by young female speakers. These can be interpreted as a prosodically-conditioned, complementary use of the features to maintain sufficient contrast. Importantly, however, the tonal difference under focus is not bidirectionally polarized, so that F0 is not lowered for the lenis stop. A lack of direct enhancement of the distinctive L tone weakens a possibility that F0 is transphonologized to the phonemic feature system of the language. As an alternative to the view that tonal features are newly introduced in the segmental phonology, we propose a prosodic account: the sound change is best characterized as a prosodically-conditioned change in the use of the segmental voicing feature (implemented by VOT) versus already available post-lexical tones in the intonational phonology of Korean.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1
An illustration of the board game situations used to create a mini dialogue context in which the target word (thasan) would receive (a) a contrastive (corrective) focus and (b) no focus; in the latter case the focus would fall on the following word ‘behind’. See the text for detail on the elicitation procedure.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Example waveforms of sentence tokens along with F0 realization in the IP-medial condition.
The target words are in bold under focus (a) with a lenis stop in tansik (‘fast’) and (b) with an aspirated stop in thatʃak (‘threshing’). In both (a) and (b), the highlighted portions of the pre-focal word nolan (‘yellow’) indicate that they are phonetically reduced along with tonal evidence of its dephrasing, so that it is parsed into an Accentual Phrase (embedded in an IP) together with the following focused words.
Fig 3
Fig 3
Variation of IP-initial VOT by (a) C-type × Age, (b) C-type × Gender, (c) C-type × Focus and (d) C-type × Age × Gender × Focus. Error bars show standard errors. *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001; n.s., not significant.
Fig 4
Fig 4
Variation of IP-initial F0 by (a) C-type × Timepoint, (b) C-type × Age, (c) C-type × Gender, (d) C-type × Focus and (e) C-type × Age × Gender × Focus × Timepoint. Note that in b–d, the F0 (St) values over the two timepoints are averaged. Error bars show standard errors. ***p < 0.001.
Fig 5
Fig 5
Variation of IP-medial VOT by (a) C-type × Age, (b) C-type × Gender, (c) C-type × Focus, (d) C-type × Age × Focus, and (e) C-type × Age × Gender × Focus. Error bars show standard errors. ***p < 0.001; n.s., not significant.
Fig 6
Fig 6
Variation of %-voicing-in-closure in IP-medial position by (a) C-type x Focus and (b) C-type x Age x Gender x Focus. Error bars show standard errors. ** p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001; n.s., not significant.
Fig 7
Fig 7
Variation of IP-medial F0 by (a) C-type × Timepoint, (b) C-type × Age, (c) C-type × Gender, (d) C-type × Focus and (e) C-type × Age × Gender × Focus × Timepoint. Note that in b–d, the F0 (St) values over the two timepoints are averaged. Error bars show standard errors. **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

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