Kang, Sun-mi and Eun Jong Kong. 2022. The realization of the Korean intermediate phrase in spontaneous speech. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 28.1. 3-31. The revised K-ToBI (Korean Tone & Break Index, Jun, 2005; 2011) introduced two types of intermediate phrase (ip) in the hierarchy of Korean intonation: (1) prominence-marking ip, cued by a pitch range reset (Ha-ip) and (2) syntactic boundary marking ip, indicated by a final high tone without lengthening (H-). Aiming to discuss the validity of ip and ip-related notations, this study examined ip realizations in Korean spontaneous speech by annotating three female speakers’ samples from Seoul Corpus based on the revised K-ToBI conventions. The spontaneous corpus was useful in showing that the two proposed ip types were identified distinctively from Accentual Phrase (AP) and Intonation Phrase (IP) by pitch resets and syntactic information. Still, the spontaneous speech data exhibited diverse patterns of ambiguous ips, proposing issues of unstable acoustic cues to ip (e.g., effects of segments and dephrasing on pitch reset identification, and phonetic variations of ip boundary tone) and of arguable use of ip-label ‘Ha-ip’. This paper discusses the issues with spontaneous speech examples. (Korea University/Chung-Ang University, Lecturer; Korea Aerospace University, Professor)

Keywords: intermediate phrase, pitch reset, prosodic phrase, K-ToBI, intonation

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