Kim, N: Tone and Prosodic Phrasing in North Kyungsang Korean

This book, which is a detailed analysis of tone and segments in North Kyungsang Korean in an OT framework, constitutes a major contribution to the study of Korean phonology, tonology, and phonological theory. The work is important for typological research, showing the occurrence of prosodic phenomena such as tone shift and doubling, floating tones and the interaction between tone and weight, which previously typified African languages, and the book is theoretically significant especially for its demonstration of the role of higher-level phonological constituency at the level of the word and sentence, governed by consideration of syllabification, structural government, and constituent binarity. (David Odden, Prof. at Dept of Linguistics, Ohio State Univ.) This book, which is a culmination of work on Korean tonal phonology, proffers the most exhaustive and comprehensive Optimality Theoretic analysis of tone and prosodic phrasing in the Korean language. It is hard to anticipate in the next few decades a better book on Korean tone than this one. (Jae-Young Lee, Prof. at Dept of English Language & Literature, Seoul National Univ.)