A syllable-based generalization of Japanese accentuation

Abstract

One of the major findings of the recent linguistic research on Japanese is that the syllable plays a pivotal role in a variety of phonological and morphological phenomena in the mora-based prosodic system of this language. This paper attempts to reinforce this argument by proposing a significant generalization of Japanese accentuation in terms of ‘syllable weight’, an idea that each syllable has a certain weight according to its phonological configuration. Specifically, this analysis reveals that Japanese accentuation is strikingly similar to that of Latin and many languages with a Latin-type accent system, e.g. English. Moreover, a sociolinguistic analysis of the accentual changes currently in progress demonstrates that Japanese accentuation is becoming increasingly similar to the Latin-type accent system, where the syllable plays a primary role. 1. TRADITIONAL ANALYSIS 1.1. Japanese Loanword Accent The traditional typology proposed by Trubetzkoy (1969) classifies Japanese as a typical ‘mora language’ as opposed to a ‘syllable language’. The conception of the mora as an indispensable unit in Japanese can be supported by a wide range of linguistic and psycholinguistic evidence (see Kubozono, forthcoming, for a summary). For example, spontaneous speech errors exhibit some peculiar patterns such as those in (1) which would only be accounted for by positing the mora as a basic behavioral unit of description (Kubozono 1989). In (1) and the rest of this paper /-/ and /./ represent mora and syllable boundaries, respectively. All syllable boundaries are mora boundaries by definition, although not vice versa. (1) a. a.ra.bu.zi-n -> a.ra.zi.bu-n ‘Arabic’ b. su.te-i.syo-n -> su.te-n.syo-n ‘(railway) station’ The mora plays a crucial role in purely phonological phenomena, too. Loanword accentuation in Tokyo Japanese, for example, has been formulated as in (2). This rule relies on both of the two prosodic units, mora and syllable: The mora plays a primary role as a unit of phonological distance, whereas the syllable serves a secondary role as the bearer of the accent (McCawley 1978). (2) Traditional loanword accent rule: Place an accent on the syllable containing the antepenultimate mora. Some examples illustrating this rule are given in (3), where accented syllables are capitalized for the sake of clarity. (3a) gives instances where an accent falls on the antepenultimate mora, i.e. the third mora from the end of the word; for example, the word ‘Christmas’ is accented on . If the antepenultimate mora does not contain a syllable nucleus as in (3b), or as in the word ‘Washington’, the accent moves on to the fourth mora from the end of the word, or onto the nucleus of the syllable which contains the antepenultimate mora. (3) Japanese loanwords and their accent a. ku.ri.SU.ma.su ‘Christmas’ ba-a.BE.kyu-u ‘BBQ’ TO.ma.to ‘tomato’ HA.wa-i ‘Hawaii’ b. wa.SI-n.to-n ‘Washington’ MYA-n.ma-a ‘Myanmar’ RO-n.do-n ‘London’ It is important to emphasize here that the the loanword accent rule in (2) is not a rule borrowed from English or any other language. It is a native Japanese rule as evidenced by the accentuation of ‘Christmas’, ‘Washington’, and many other words whose accentuation in Japanese is different from that of the same word in their source language. The native nature of the loanword accent rule in (2) has been further borne out by some recent studies (e.g. Kubozono and Ohta 1998). These studies have shown that the accent rule in (2) is not restricted to loanwords, but it accounts for the basic accentual structure of other types of word, i.e. native Japanese and Sino-Japanese words. In this sense, the rule in (2) represents an unmarked accent rule of Japanese nouns in general.