Prosodic licensing in Korean wh-questions: De-phrasing and pitch reduction

Prosodic licensing in Korean wh-questions: De-phrasing and pitch reduction

This paper discusses the prosody of Korean wh-questions and prosodic grouping accompanied by de-phrasing and pitch reduction. Our findings show that Jun and Oh’s (1996) observation on the wh-phrasing needs to be clarified. While they proposed a phonological condition of a wh-word forming an AP with the following word, Experiment 1 reveals wh-elements tend to be grouped with an IP boundary, ignoring any elements situated between them. Experiment 2 further clarifies that, instead of just an IP boundary, Korean wh-phrasing actually reacts to the Q-features. This can be inferred from the empirical data showing that the embedded C head of that-clause is prosodically not realized while that of if-clause is realized. Specifically, the elements between the wh-element and its licensor are prosodically reduced/deleted, indicating a possible prosodic grouping in Seoul Korean wh-questions. To explain this phenomenon, we adopt Richards’ (2016) Generalized Contiguity Theory and its notion of agreeing/selecting elements being dominated by a single prosodic node. We propose that in Korean, wh-element must also agree with its licensor by forming a unified prosodic unit, which we term Basin formation.