Prosodic Compensations for Omission of Particles in Korean

This study aims to investigate how absence of particles is compensated by prosody. The current study focuses on topic particle -un/-nun, subject particle -i/-ka, object particle -ul/-lul, and genitive particle -uy in Korean. In order to figure it out, an experiment was carried out, a sentence reading task, with thirty native speakers of Korean. The result indicates that (i) when the particle is omitted, the phrase ends with the biggest prosodic unit, IP, while it ends with a smaller unit, AP, when the particle exists; (ii) absence of particles leads to high pitch as a final tune, whereas the final tunes vary when a sentence has a particle; and (iii) subjects tend to lengthen the last syllable before the absent particle. Nevertheless, not all particles compensate for the missing particle due to the exception of the genitive particle. The exception is accounted for by the frequency of particle omission. Since native speakers of Korean are used to dropping the genitive particle [8], there is little compensation for the absence of -uy. Moreover, the results of other particles indicate that there are slightly different degrees of compensation depending on which particle is omitted. In other words, more compensation occurs for missing topic particles, subject particles, and object particles in order, which is inversely related to the frequency of omission. That is to say, the less frequently particles are omitted, the more compensation is required.