Volume 36, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces in Japanese and Korean Guest Editor: Haruo Kubozono

While recent work has made it abundantly clear that the metrical foot is fundamental for any understanding of the accent pattern of Japanese and its dialects, other features of these pitch accent systems are directly linked to the constraints aligning tonal melodies with prosodic structure. This paper presents some results on the microvariation in the pitch accent systems of the dialects of Kagoshima Prefecture: the main Kagoshima City dialect, and the separate dialects of Koshikijima island and the southernmost Kikaijima island (Ryukyu archipelago). All these dialects, except for the Kagoshima City dialect, are in serious decline in terms of numbers of speakers. We show that the accentual microvariation in Kagoshima Japanese is due to a simple reranking of the basic constraints aligning the accentual melodies HL and H. The difference in tone-bearing unit between dialects (syllable- vs. mora-counting behavior), difficult to analyze as a parameter setting, follows from the ranking of constraints against tonal contours on moras and syllables.

This paper examines the nature and behavior of secondary H(igh) tones in Koshikijima Japanese, a highly endangered dialect spoken on three small, remote islands in the south of Japan. This dialect generally has a mora-counting prosodic system with two distinctive accent types/classes (Type A and Type B), and displays two H tones, primary and secondary, in words of three or more moras: The primary H tone appears on the penultimate and final moras in Type A and Type B, respectively, whereas the secondary H tone occurs at the beginning of the word redundantly. Koshikijima Japanese displays regional variations with respect to the secondary H tone, particularly regarding its domain/position, its (in)dependence on the primary H tone, its interaction with the syllable, and its behavior in postlexical phonology. This paper examines how the secondary H tone behaves differently in three distinct accent systems of the dialect: (i) the system described by Takaji Kamimura eighty years ago, (ii) the one that is found quite extensively on the islands today, including Kamimura’s native village (Nakakoshiki) and Teuchi Village, and (iii) the system observed in Kuwanoura Village today. Comparing the three accent systems, this paper also proposes historical scenarios to account for the different behaviors of the secondary H tone across time and space.

Focusing on the three-pattern accentual systems in Uechi, a dialect of the Miyako archipelago, this paper argues that the prosodic category PWd plays a pivotal role, in addition to the mora, as basic prosodic unit required to calculate accent placement. The paper also shows that prosodic conditions that bring about neutralizations of tonal patterns in Uechi can be fully accounted for by making use of PWd, in addition to postulating that the PWds consist of recursive structures. It then reports, focusing on the dialect of Tarama island in the same Miyako archipelago, a representative case of tonal alternations occurring at the sentence level, in which the odd numbered (1st, 3rd, etc.) accents in a sentence change High tone to Low tone, while the even numbered (2nd, 4th, etc.) change Low tone to High tone. The discovery of such unique types of pitch realization in the prosodic systems in this area should make an important contribution to typological studies of prosodic systems of Japanese, as well as of other languages.

Theories of the phonetics-prosody interface suggest that prosodic strengthening that arises with prosodic structuring is not simply a low-level phonetic phenomenon, but it serves as a phonetic hallmark of a higher-order prosodic structure in reference to linguistic (phonological) contrast. The present study builds on this theoretical premise by examining acoustic realization of the phonological tonal contrast in the lexical pitch accent system of South Kyungsang (SK) Korean. Results showed that phonetic realization of F0 and the degree of glottalization (as reflected in spectral tilt measures such as H1-A1c and H1-A3c) of vowels in vowel-initial words were systematically modulated by the higher-order prosodic structure, and that the prosodic-structural modulation gave rise to distinct prosodic strengthening effects as a function of the source of prosodic strengthening. In particular, the prominence-induced strengthening (due to focus) entailed a phonetic polarizing effect on the F0 contrast in a way that enhances the phonological High vs. Low tone contrast. The boundary-induced strengthening effect, on the other hand, could be better understood as enhancing the phonetic clarity of prosodic junctures. The distinct prosodic strengthening effects were further evident in the way that glottalization was fine-tuned according to prosodic structure and phonological (tonal) contrast. Prosodic strengthening effects were also found to interact with intrinsic vowel height, implying that the low-level phonetic effect may be under speaker control in reference to higher-order prosodic and phonological contrast systems of the language. Finally, the results informed a theoretical debate regarding whether the Low tone that contrasts with the High tone in word-initial position should be considered lexically specified vs. post-lexical assigned.

In studying the effect of syntax and focus on prosodic phrasing, the main issue of investigation has been to explain and predict the location of a prosodic boundary, and not much attention has been given to the nature of prosodic phrasing. In this paper, we offer evidence from intonation patterns of utterances that prosodic phrasing can be formed differently phonologically and phonetically due to its function of marking syntactic structure vs. focus (prominence) in Yanbian Korean, a lexical pitch accent dialect of Korean spoken in the northeastern part of China, just above North Korea. We show that the location of a H tone in syntax-marking Accentual Phrase (AP) is determined by the type of syntactic head, noun or verb (a VP is marked by an AP-initial H while an NP is marked by an AP-final H), while prominence-marking accentual phrasing is cued by AP-initial H. The difference in prosodic phrasing due to its dual function in Yanbian Korean is compared with that of Seoul Korean, and a prediction is made on the possibility of finding such difference in other languages based on the prosodic typology proposed in (Jun, Sun-Ah. 2014b. Prosodic typology: by prominence type, word prosody, and macro-rhythm. In Sun-Ah Jun (ed.), Prosodic Typology II: The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing . 520–539. Oxford: Oxford University Press).