On the prosody of reported speech in Seoul Korean

Abstract

A romantic description of prosody is to call it the melody of speech. Though this is not altogether wrong, a linguistic definition would state that prosody is concerned with the suprasegmental features of languages– with intonational features such as tonal structure, pitch, duration, and intensity (Féry, 2016). Elements such as pitch, tonal structure, and intensity imply that prosody is restricted to spoken languages. This is, in fact, not the case; Sandler et al. (2020) claim that prosody exists in signed languages, signalled through manual or non-manual gestures, such as repetition or duration of a sign. Prosody can be organized into a hierarchical structure, which Féry (2016) defines as “[...] the parsing of continuous speech” into “organized prosodic domains.” Though moras, syllables, and feet are all a part of the prosodic structure (Féry, 2016), these lower-level prosodic constituents are not of interest for the current study. Instead, the interest lies in the higher-level prosodic constituents, namely the phonological phrase and intonational phrase. The role of prosody in speech is multifaceted. It can aid in disambiguating structurally ambiguous strings, indicate different sentence types through pitch contours, indicate prominence, convey direct versus indirect speech acts, and signal turn-taking in conversation (Hirschberg, 2002). It is the communication of direct and indirect speech acts which is the focus of the current study. This paper is concerned with the intonational phonology and prosodic structure of Seoul Korean, specifically with the use of reported speech. There is a structural element in Korean that indicates “quote,” and the interaction of this structural element, or rather morpheme, with intonational elements of the utterance is the focus of this paper. This morpheme (glossed as QUOT below) is illustrated in the examples of indirect and direct reported speech in Korean in (1). (1) a. Indirect speech: yecin ssi-nun cikum ka-ntako haysseyo Yejin HON-TOP now go-QUOT do “Yejin said that she’s going now.” b. Direct speech: yecin ssi-nun cikum ka lako haysseyo Yejin HON-TOP now go QUOT do “Yejin said ‘I’m going now.’” How this structural element may influence the intonational elements, and vice versa, is of great interest. Consequently, this paper is not only concerned with prosody, but the interface between syntax and phonology. My goal is to uncover the extent that prosody is used to convey that a segment of an utterance is a reproduction of speech produced at another time, in another context, by either the current speaker or someone else. In the context of Korean, how will a structural element, the quotative morpheme, influence the use of reported speech prosody? It seems likely that the presence of what could be considered a structural “unquote” (indicating the end of the reported speech) within the utterance would reduce the need for the speaker to use other tools, such as prosody, to inform the listener that what they’re hearing is a quotation. A description of the prosody of reported speech in Korean may provide insight into how prosodic elements interact with syntax, and how prosody may be used in disambiguating not a syntactically ambiguous structure, but rather a disembodied element of a conversation, attributed to another time (and potentially another speaker).