This paper provides an experimental approach following Burton and Matthewson (2015)’s storyboard method, to elicit natural data concerning the distribution of Sentence Final Particles in Korean. The data obtained in the experiments in this study were analyzed with Praat, offering thus an account encompassing prosody. We determine using previous work on the Speech Act layer (Speas and Tenny 2003, Heim et al. 2014, 2016) the different functional projections of discourse marking in Korean, and propose a syntactic account of why these particles may not stack. Our contribution is twofold: First, we present new data empirically confirming and complementing traditional semantic categorizations of discourse particles in Korean, and secondly we offer an enriched syntactic account of these particles namely by adding an intonational dimension. To conclude, we present a parallel between Cantonese and Korean in their abilities to stack overt sentence final morphemes. We point to future research that can combine the discourse, phonology and syntactic interfaces to solve this puzzle.
1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
3. Methodology
4. Results
5. Analysis
6. Stacking SFPs: A comparison between tonal and non-tonal languages
7. Conclusion
References