Abstract
Previous expositions of Japanese accent have assumed that unaccented forms of inflected words are to be equated in basic accent type with atonic nouns; they also assume that verb and adjective bases display two accent types, to be equated respectively with the atonic class of nouns and with the several tonic classes. It is possible to simplify the description by assuming that the phonemically unaccented forms have a morphophonemic final accent, automatically lost before juncture (which, in turn, may disappear). This leads us to reconsider the adjective bases, for which neither of the traditional patterns turns out to be atonic; moreover, an examination of new data reveals four different patterns, instead of the traditional two, with some bases exhibiting ambivalent behavior.
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