Kim, Miran & Yim, Changguk. 2014. Phonetic characteristics of sentence medial vs. sentence final '-yo' particle in Korean. Language Information. Volume 18. 27-50. This study investigates phonetic characteristics of '-yo' particle in Korean, whose grammatical function is basically similar to the declarative particle '-ta'. The '-yo' particle follows the verb at the end of a sentence and it can be attached to sentence medial non-verbal elements. Interestingly, the apparent '-yo' duplication is legal only in the presence of sentence-final '-yo'. This condition leads us to an assumption that the medial '-yo' is linked to the sentence final particle at a certain linguistic level. Our main goal is to investigate to which extent the phonetic characteristics of sentence medial '-yo' particle are comparable to those of the sentence final one. Speech data were collected from 9 female informants in a laboratory setting and our measurements include pitch and temporal dimensions (e.g., syllable lengthening and pause duration). We found (1) that the two '-yo' particles are phonetically similar to each other in terms of the types of boundary tone associated and the presence of lengthening, and (2) that they differ in the degree of lengthening and pause. Our phonetic results can help us understand the '-yo' duplication phenomenon.
Key words: '-yo' duplication, sentence medial vs. sentence final '-yo', final lengthening, boundary tone, pause duration. intonational phrase, accentual phrase