The Handbook of Korean Linguistics

Lucien Brown, Jaehoon Yeon, Lucien Brown, Jaehoon Yeon

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781119016878
  9781118354919
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118370841
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Handbook of Korean Linguistics presents state-of-the-art overviews of the linguistic research on the Korean language.

• Structured to allow a range of theoretical perspectives in addressing linguistic phenomena

• Includes chapters on Old Korean and Middle Korean, present-day language policies in North and South Korea, social aspects of Korean as a heritage language, and honorifics

• Indispensable and unique resource not only for those studying Korean linguistics but cross-linguistic research in general

Part I
The Sounds of Korean

1
Vowels and Consonants

JIYOUNG SHIN

1 Introduction

The characteristics of vowels and consonants in Korean are discussed in this chapter. Specifically, this chapter introduces which vowels and consonants are phonemes in Korean and what their phonetic characteristics are and also examines how often they are used. In this discussion, reference is chiefly made to the Seoul dialect, which is more commonly known as Standard Korean.

Section 2 introduces the phoneme inventories of vowels and consonants. Though there is generally a consensus regarding the constituents of the Korean consonant system, this is not matched by that of the Korean vowel system, about which phonologists tend to disagree. The debate in the literature is centered on the number of monophthongs in the Korean vowel system, with some scholars claiming that there are only seven and others claiming that there could be as many as ten. Some other issues related to the vowel system of Korean are also discussed in detail.

Section 3 examines the phonetic properties of Korean vowels and consonants. For the purposes of investigating the phonetic properties of Korean vowels, the results of acoustic analysis of simple vowels produced by twenty speakers of Standard Korean are presented in comparison with the acoustic properties of cardinal vowels. Spectrograms in various phonetic environments are displayed, and there is a review of the results of previous studies, allowing for an examination of the properties of Korean consonants.

Section 4 provides information regarding the frequency of Korean vowels and consonants to uncover the relative usage frequency of different vowels and consonants in Korean. The frequencies of occurrence of Korean sounds are examined through reference to dictionary data and spontaneous speech data. The results of the two data sets are compared and discussed. A summary of this discussion is then presented in Section 5.

2 Phoneme inventory

2.1 Vowel inventory

Vowels are divided into two categories according to their articulatory movement pattern: monophthongs and diphthongs. Monophthongs (or simple vowels) are vowels with a single articulatory movement. In other words, monophthongs do not have an articulatory change from beginning to end. On the other hand, diphthongs are vowels with an articulatory change during their production. Diphthongs contain two elements: a glide and a monophthong. They can be categorized according to the order of these two elements as on-glide diphthongs (glide followed by monophthong) and off-glide diphthongs (monophthong followed by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Editors’ Note
• Note on Transcriptions
• Part I: The Sounds of Korean
• Part II: Topics in Korean Morphology and Syntax
• Part III: Syntax, Semantics, and their Interface
• Part IV: Discourse, Pragmatics, and Grammaticalization
• Part V: Language Acquisition
• Part VI: Varieties of Korean
• Index
• End User License Agreement