Prosodic disambiguation of Korean relative clause attachments (original) (raw)

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013

Abstract

Korean relative clauses do not have to be adjacent to the substantives they modify; genitive noun phrases can interpose between the relative clause and the substantive. Thus, the syntactic analysis of a given relative clause is inherently ambiguous, such that the relative clause can modify either the head noun of a genitive noun phrase or the complex noun phrase as a whole. However, in spoken language, one rarely finds this type of ambiguity even though the relative clause could modify either of the two nouns. This suggests that speakers use prosody to convey intended meaning, with different prosodic cues associated with different syntactic boundaries, thus, providing information necessary for disambiguation. We examined the clarification of surface structure ambiguity in Korean relative clause attachments via prosody. The survey confirmed that native speakers think relative clauses are surface ambiguous. The acoustical analysis revealed that prosodic disambiguation consists of pause insertion, pitch raising, and final lengthening at the syntactic boundary. Regarding the relative importance of different prosodic measures used by speakers, we discovered that pitch raising was a more powerful measure than final lengthening in prosodic disambiguation, and that pausing played the least important role in the parsing of an ambiguous relative clause.

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