Prosodic phrasing, long-distance rise, and structural prominence-marking in Japanese dialects without lexically contrastive tones

Abstract

This chapter describes aspects of the prosodic structures of Japanese accentless dialects with a focus on prosodic phrasing, pitch peak alignment, and prosodic focus-marking. The accentual phrases in these dialects can contain more than one phonological word. Hence, there is a tendency for accentual phrases to be long. In some accentless dialects, the pitch peak location in the accentual phrase varies considerably. When it is located around the end of a long accentual phrase, a long, continuously rising contour is observed. Focus is signaled structurally by inserting an accentual phrase boundary at the beginning of the focused word. When a long-distance rise occurs, there is a gap between the focus location and the peak location. This discrepancy between semantic and phonetic salience indicates that prominence in accentless dialects is realized purely structurally, with the left edge of the accentual phrase being the phonologically prominent position.