Intonation and Prosody of the Declarative Sentence Type in Seoul Korean

It has been claimed that the declarative sentence type in Seoul Korean mostly has a falling terminal pitch/F0 contour. Further, it has been claimed that imperative and propositive sentence types also have a falling terminal pitch/F0 contour, thus when declarative has the same morphosyntactic structure with imperative and propositive sentence types, the three sentence types can be distinguished only by contextual cues rather than phonetic cues. However, the previous studies do not acknowledge that the three sentence types can have different intonationally defined phrase structures, especially the so-called ‘Accentual Phrase’ structure. This paper, therefore, investigates boundary tone types and accentual phrase structure of declarative sentence type in Seoul Korean. It is shown that the declarative can have at least six different boundary tone types and forms different accentual phrase structure from imperative.