Contrastive Study of the Relationships between Prosody and Syntax in Japanese and Korean

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

As for the perception of pitch accent by Korean learners of Japanese, the result shows clear evidence that the basic perception unit is the mora and the syllable for Japanese and Korean, respectively. We have seen in the prosodic resolution of ambiguities in syntax that for syntactically parallel structures in Japanese and Korean, pitch is used in Japanese whereas duration or pause is used in Korean. But interestingly, as the observation extends to dialectal differences, we have the grouping of pitch sensitive Tokyo Japanese and Kyongsang Korean as against so-called non-pitch Sendai Japanese and Seoul Korean. On the theoretical side, we proposed the framework of autonomous modular grammar for integrated treatment of prosodic and syntactic information to be given as mutual constraints to the two independent syntax modules.Our research activities are centered on the focus in discourse and syntactic ambiguities, and the results have been published in journal papers and international proceedings papers.