Perceived prominence and downstep in Japanese

Lexical Category and Downstep in Japanese

“…The empirical results of Hirayama and Hwang (2016), Hwang and Hirayama (2021), and Kubozono (1992) are opposite to those reported in Selkirk and Tateishi (1991). Kubozono (1992) reports that downstep occurs in [N 1 [N 2 N 3 ]].…”

“…The review shows that different kinds of syntactic information may block downstep, while not all syntactic boundaries affect it. We discuss the effects of maximal projection boundaries (Selkirk and Tateishi 1991), the boundary between the subject noun phrase (NP) and predicate verb phrase (VP) Ishihara 2016), relative clause boundaries , and parts of speech (Selkirk and Tateishi 1991;Hwang 2016, 2019;Hwang and Hirayama 2021) on downstep. Selkirk and Tateishi (1991) argue that the left edges of maximal projections, or XPs, block downstep.…”

“…Kubozono (1992) reports that downstep occurs in [N 1 [N 2 N 3 ]]. Hirayama and Hwang (2016) and Hwang and Hirayama (2021), like Selkirk and Tateishi, compared [A 1 [A 2 N]] and [N 1 [N 2 N 3 ]], and investigated whether downstep occurred. However, they increased the number of speakers in their experiment and adopted the more traditional definition of downstep found in the Japanese literature (e.g., Kubozono 1988Kubozono , 1989Kubozono , 1993Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988;Poser 1984).…”

“…report that downstep occurred in all conditions (i.e., ( 3) and ( 4)) but note that in (3), the pattern was much more robust in the verb condition (3b) than in the adjective condition (3a) in that all speakers showed downstep in the former while there was interspeaker variation in the latter. extended the investigation of downstep to remaining possibilities researched in Hwang (2016, 2019) and Hwang and Hirayama (2021), and tested verbs in their nonpast forms in relative clauses, nouns accompanied by the past tense form of a copula in relative clauses, and nouns in the predicative position in non-relative clauses, as in ( 5):…”

“…For example, in (1a) and Figure 1, focusing on the noun phrase aóku nagái négi 'green and long leek', the whole phrase constitutes a single MaP, with each word forming a minor phrase (MiP), a phrase that allows at most one accent: ((aóku) MiP (nagái) MiP (négi) MiP ) MaP . 1 Moreover, as discussed extensively in Section 2, downstep is reportedly sensitive to certain syntactic information, including whether a given constituent is a maximal projection (i.e., an XP) (Selkirk and Tateishi 1991), branching structures (e.g., Kubozono 1989Kubozono , 1992Ito and Mester 2013), and the part of speech of a given word Hwang 2016, 2019;Hwang and Hirayama 2021;Selkirk and Tateishi 1991). The left edges of relevant syntactic elements are presumably mapped onto the left edges of MaPs, which then block downstep.…”