Organisation of Japanese prosody

Abstract

This thesis is an experimental phonological study of pitch in Tokyo Japanese. It comprises five chapters all discussing prosodic processes and phenomena relating to accent, tone or intonation on the basis of experimental evidence. The discussion in each chapter is developed essentially in the following three steps: (i) a critical review or overview of the past work on the subject discussed in the chapter or section; (ii) presentation of new evidence mostly from instrumental experiments; (iii) a discussion of the experimental evidence in theoretical contexts.

After outlining the nature and function of word accent in Chapter One, I discuss in Chapter Two the prosodic compound formation process which has traditionally been described as an accent (re)assignment process. I analyze the linguistic structures of those compounds which are not subject to the compound accent rules, and propose several factors which constrain the prosodic compound formation process, defining them as the linguistic conditions on the process.

Chapters Three through Five deal with word accent in a wider context of speech, discussing its roles, behavior and phonetic realization in phrase or sentence perspective. Chapter Three discusses the phonetics and phonology of 'accentual fall, ' 'accentual boost' and 'accent clash, ' for each of which the fallacies underlying the impressionistic descriptions in the literature are demonstrated.

Four discusses various problems relating to intonational phrases and phrasing. The first part of the chapter focuses on the definition of the two intonational phrases, 'major phrase' and 'minor phrase' while the second part of the chapter explores the linguistic conditions on 'minor phrase formation, ' the intonational phrasing process whereby two or more syntactic/morphological units are combined to form one minor intonational phrase.

Chapter Five examines the linguistic structure of 'downtrend, ' the phenomenon whereby pitch declines during the course of utterances. It is shown in the first part of the chapter that Poser's 'catathesis' (downstep) model is a largely adequate model of the intonational phenomenon. After confirming that the trigger of the downtrend phenomenon is largely attributable to accent, it is shown in the second part of the chapter that this accent-triggered process varies considerably depending on the syntactic structure of the phrase or sentence involved, or, in other words, that the configuration of downstep serves to disambiguate otherwise ambiguous syntactic structures. In the course of discussing the specific topics just mentioned, several more general theoretical issues are addressed, including the following four topics: the relation between syntactic structure and phonological structure; the organization of rhythmic structure; the abstractness of phonological (tonal) representation; and the nature of phonetic realization rules.