Syntactic and rhythmic effects on downstep in Japanese

Abstract

The past decade or so has seen increasing interest in prosodic research, and remarkable progress has been made in the study of accent and intonation, both empirical and theoretical. Research in Japanese intonation is no exception in this respect, as evidenced by such works as Poser (1984) and Beckman & Pierrehumbert (1986), among others, which have developed theoretical discussions on many interesting phonological issues on the basis of their own experimental evidence.

11. Resolution of branching ambiguity and the role of prosody

“…Kubozono (1989;1993) observes that the F0 peak of a predicted downstepping N1 in the left-branching structure is realized higher when the whole phrase involves four items instead of three, as in Figure 11. This was reconfirmed in later studies such as Shinya, Selkirk and Kawahara (2004).…”

“…According to such a view, the prosodic phrasing status at the major phrase level associated with the two distinct syntactic branching structures is therefore the same if downstep occurs over the three elements irrespective of the syntactic branching structures. Kubozono (1989) proposed that the phonetic realization rule parses the distinct hierarchical structures within the domain of downstep, wherein a minor phrase representation can be formed by a binary recursive mechanism. As a result, (1) could have the two possible structures shown in (3), depending on the syntactic branching structure associated with it.…”

Japanese focus prosody revisited: Freeing focus from prosodic phrasing

“…There are two more register-related phenomena that have been discussed as phonetic cues for prosodic phrasing, namely, downstep and pitch register resetting (Poser, 1984;Pierrehumbert and Beckman, 1988;Kubozono, 1989Kubozono, , 1993Selkirk and Tateishi, 1991, among many others). Although these two phenomena are often discussed hand-in-hand, as if they were two sides of the same coin, they should be distinguished clearly in our discussion.…”

“…5 Recursivity has been found in other levels of the prosodic hierarchy as well. See, for example, Ladd (1988) for the English i-phrase, Kubozono (1989Kubozono ( , 1993 This means that in a 'default' prosodic structure, i.e., a prosodic structure created in an information structurally neutral (allnew) context, the location of left boundaries of w-phrases is predictable from the syntactic structure. We will see below that the ranking of this constraint becomes crucial in the proposal to be made in this paper.…”

Acoustic Correlates of English Rhythmic Patterns for American versus Japanese Speakers

“…Kubozono [1989Kubozono [ , 1993 found an extra F 0 boost on the third element in the left-branching noun phrase consisting of 4 Japanese phrases and considered it a strategy to avoid a lapse of stress according to the principle of rhythmic alternation. Otherwise, the contexts and acoustic manifestations of rhythmic alternation in Japanese have not yet been made clear by researchers.…”