Question intonation in conversational speech: Chungcheong and Gyeongsang varieties of Korean

This study analyzed unscripted, conversational speech to investigate differences in question intonation in Korean varieties spoken in Chungcheong (CC) and Gyeongsang (GS). It is traditionally assumed that, apart from differences in word-level prosody, these two varieties differ in their intonational marking of questions, the CC variety typically using a final fo rise, and the GS variety using a final fo fall. Hierarchical clustering of fo contours and random forest analysis were used to inspect patterns emerging from the data. Further manual examination was conducted for the individual fo patterns. An investigation of the effects of variety and question type (alternative, polar, and wh-questions) did not strongly support the traditional account of the dialectal difference. Nonetheless, evidence for the interaction between variety and question type predictors was shown in the distribution of fo contours, with the GS variety showing greater variation than the CC variety. The approach taken here constitutes an effective analytical pipeline for exploring the distribution of fo contours in speech data with a high degree of sociolinguistic variation that is generally absent in scripted speech data. This study further shows that combining data-driven and linguistically informed analyses is useful for reconciling phonetic and linguistic approaches to analyzing intonation.