Korean stop tensification and temporal variations
Miyeon Ahn (Hankyong National University)
Abstract
The three-way laryngeal contrast in Korean stop consonants often ends up losing
sharp boundaries between lax and tense stops due to the tensification of lax stops as
in /kim-pɑp/ → [kim-p*ɑp] ‘a seaweed roll.’ It turns out that there are two types of
tense stops in Korean: one is a derived tense stop, as in the previous example, and the
other a canonical tense stop, as in /ɑp*ɑ/→ [ɑp*ɑ] ‘dad.’ The purpose of this study is
to examine these tense stops in Korean by exploring their characteristics of temporal
variation. Based on a corpus analysis, we show that both phonological and social
factors are associated with various consonantal durations. Specifically, it is found that
(i) phonologically different tense stops result in temporal variations in that the
consonantal durations of the derived ones are significantly longer than those of the
canonical ones; and (ii) larger durational differences were found in female speakers’
utterances, although both male and female speakers displayed similar patterns. These
temporal variations may be understood in terms of both psycholinguistic and
sociolinguistic aspects of language use.
Keywords
Korean stop tensification, duration, variations, phonological conditions