Pitch accent and tonal alignment in Kagoshima Japanese

Abstract

Abstract 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.