The interplay between lexical and postlexical tonal phenomena and the prosodic structure in Masan/Changwon Korean

In some languages, such as Korean and Japanese, some theoretically interesting postlexical tonal phenomena have been observed. The phenomena include, for example, downstep and edge tones in Tokyo Japanese (e.g. Kawakami 1961b, Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988) and downstep and upstep in Northern Gyeongsang Korean (Kenstowicz and Sohn 1997, Jun et al. 2006). Also, some phenomena have shown the interplay between lexical and postlexical tonal phenomena. For example, in Tokyo Japanese, downstep is only observed after a lexically accented word under some syntactic conditions and/or focus conditions. In previous literature, these findings have been motivators to posit the prosodic structure. This paper deals with these issues with special reference to Masan/Changwon Korean (hereafter, MCK), whose postlexical tonal phenomena have not been studied well. MCK is spoken in two neighbouring cities, Masan and Changwon, located in the south central region of Southern Gyeongsang Province, South Korea. In Korean dialectology, it is widely known that dialects spoken in Northern and Southern Gyeongsang Province of Korea have lexical tonal phenomena, as opposed to most of the other dialects, such as Seoul dialect, which only have postlexical tones. In this paper, Masan dialect and Changwon dialect are regarded as one dialect, MCK, since these two cities are in the same living sphere and have shown no dialectic differences so far. Some other Southern Gyeongsang dialects such as Busan dialect seem to have a similar tonal system to that of MCK reported in this paper. On the other hand, dialects in the Northern Gyeongsang Province (e.g.