자동사 구문의 억양과 의미정보: 영어 원어민과 한국인 학습자의 발화 분석

Abstract

This study investigates how semantic features effect the intonational realization of intransitive verbs. The traditional unergative-unaccusative dichotomy has been linked to differences in the phonetic constructions in which they appear. Previous linguistic analyses claim that the placement of pitch accents is determined by the verb-argument structure of the intransitive sentences in a broad focus context. Recently along with the growing interests on information structure, Hirsch and Wagner(2011) propose that intransitive verb sentences are also affected by their information structure such as humanity and appearance. We replicated their experimental samples and further extended with more phonetically and semantically controlled sentences. We recorded speech of native speakers and Korean learners of English and performed acoustic analyses. Our results support Hirsch & Wagner’s topicality, the animacy of argument and the lexical meaning of appearance/disappearance have influence on the intonation patterns on intransitive verb sentences. One interesting finding is that Korean learners of English have a tendency to assign pitch accent on subjects regardless of the type of intransitive verbs. Furthermore, their syntactic knowledge of English intransitive verbs do not seem to directly influence the intonational realization once they fully understand the meaning of the sentences at the time of utterance. From the view of information structure, Korean speakers could, to some degree, differentiate the prosodic pattern in the sentences which were controlled by animacy. Interestingly, the beginner group was more likely to produce the pitch accent similar to native speakers than the advanced group in those intransitive sentences, particularly in the sentence including an unaccusative verb. It can be assumed that there occurred a conflict between syntactic knowledge of the intransitive sentence of L2 and lexical information of L1 when the sentences were being produced. Although Korean speakers seemed to be able to recognize the difference between human and non-human, unlike native speakers of English, they failed to differentiate the prosodic patterns of appearance and disappearance. Therefore, for the effective teaching of intonation for Korean learners of English, developing teaching models based on the information status such as thematic role, animacy, new vs. given information will be more helpful and efficient than those based on the syntactic structure.