A Cross-Linguistic Study of Prosodic Phrasing in the RC Attachment Ambiguity:
Comparison between English and Korean

Fernandez et al. (2003, 2004) investigated whether there is a prosodic correlation of RC-length and position effects across languages based on the study of Hemforth et al. (to appear). Fernandez and her colleagues did a production experiment using “Post-to-Times” elicitation technique. The duration and pitch movement data in their study showed that the overt prosody for the RC attachment construction in both English and Spanish is influenced by the length and position of the RC.

In the present study, I report that the RC length in the disambiguated context affects the overt prosody for the RC attachment construction in Korean, using the same experiment technique as in Fernandez (20003, 2004). I collected data from 6 English and 6 Korean native speakers. I adopted the materials from Fernandez (2000), and in the test stimuli Korean sentences were translated to show equivalent meanings as in English counterparts.

Preliminary results show that as in the study of Fernandez et al. (2003, 2004), there is also a length effect in Korean, that is, the longer the RC is the bigger the amount of the duration is. The length of RC correlates with the prosody of the RC attachment in their production even though subjects interpret the sentences as having the low attachment.

This provides us with some sense that there are some universal aspects in the phrasing of RC attachment across languages. Therefore, my study gives additional supporting evidence to the result of Fernandez et al. (2003, 2004). Based on the findings, I further discuss differences and similarities between English and Korean in terms of the phrasing pattern of RC attachment.