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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17959/sppm.2023.29.3.377

PDF: 본문파일

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