This paper examines the phonetic correlates of the informational status of referring expressions in Seoul Korean. Two experiments were conducted. The results of the first experiment suggest that speakers of Seoul Korean indicate the informational status of referring expressions not only with quantitative increases and decreases in acoustic cues such as duration, FO range, and amplitude but also with qualitative changes in accentual phrasing (i.e., the phrasing of accentual phrases, the tonally defined prosodic unit below the intonational phrase). The results of the second experiment suggest that speakers of Seoul Korean rather clearly distinguish “current” and “displaced” discourse entities. This result is taken as supporting the division by Brown (1983) and Yule (1981) of textually given entities into current evoked versus displaced evoked entities. It is also suggested that producing given expressions as one accentual phrase is part of the phonetic attenuation which Chafe (1976) discusses. The term “intonational attenuation” is proposed to describe the use of accentual phrasing by some languages to indicate the informational status of referring expressions.
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