Prosodic correlation between the focusing adverb ozik ‘only’ and focus/givenness in korean

This study investigates the prosodic correlation between the focusing adverb ozik ‘only’ and focus/GIVENness in Korean. The goal is to test the issue of whether or not the element associated with ozik can be dephrased in Korean. This question is answered by a perceptual experiment in which the pitch contours of target sentences (i.e. Jeoneun ozik gichareul tamnida ‘I only take the train’ and Jeoneun ozik daehanhanggongeul iyonghamnida ‘I only take Korean Air.’) are modified using Praat. The modified sentences are embedded in two competing contexts in which focus/GIVENness on the element associated with ozik (i.e. gichareul ‘the train’, daehanhanggongeul ‘Korean Air’) is elicited. The results reveal that DoubleH (where both the focusing adverb and the object have prosodic prominence) is shown to be the most favored prosodic model when the element associated with ozik is focused in discourse. Conversely, OzikH (where the focusing adverb has prosodic prominence) is shown to be most favored when the element associated with ozik is GIVEN. Therefore, we argue that the element associated with ozik can be either prosodically prominent or dephrased depending on the discourse. This finding demonstrates that discourse functions such as focus and GIVENness are not directly contingent on the lexical semantics of the focusing adverb but instead are constrained by the discourse.