Prosody is the pattern of intonation and rhythm that makes speech coherent. It is structured into a hierarchy of constituents such as intonational phrases at the large end and syllables at the other. Prosodic Phonology is a theory that says this prosodic structure is also the determinant of phonological rule domains. This dissertation is an account of prosodic structure of Korean relating the intonational pattern to the prosodic structure. The prosodic structure proposed by Prosodic Phonologists (Selkirk 1984; Nespor and Vogel 1986: Hayes 1989) is in contrast with my proposal in that they define a prosodic unit mainly based on syntactic information. The importance of the intonation pattern in the prosodic unit formation is also suggested by others such as Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988).
Based on the intonational pattern of an utterance, Korean has an Intonational Phrase and an Accentual Phrase. The Intonational Phrase in my model is the same level as the Intonational Phrase proposed by the Prosodic Phonologists and the Accentual Phrase is the same level as their Phonological Phrase but differ from it in that the Accentual Phrase is defined by the tonal pattern.
To see if the tonally defined prosodic unit also serves as a domain of segmental phonological rule, I ran several instrumental experiments. The rules I examined were Lenis Stop Voicing, Obstruent Nasalization, Spirantization, and /s/-palatalization. For Post Obstruent Tensing and Vowel Shortening, informal observation is reported.
The results show that these prosodic units defined by the tonal pattern of an utterance are also the domain of these postlexical phonological rules. It was also shown that these tonally defined domain can better account for the actual data than the prosodic units defined based on the syntactic information. Then, I discussed several non-syntactic and non-linguistic factors affecting the tonally defined prosodic phrasing such as speech rate, weight of a phrase, semantic and pragmatic factor. Finally, I proposed a syntactic constraint on the phrasing.