Prosodic subcategories in Japanese

Abstract

Research on Japanese prosody, especially on the pitch accent system of the language, has for a long time found that a single domain “phonological phrase” is not sufficient. Rather, two domains need to be distinguished, which go by various names (Minor vs. Major Phrase, Accentual vs. Intermediate Phrase). While empirically well-founded, these developments, together with similar findings in other languages, have resulted in a dissolution of the originally tightly organized universal prosodic hierarchy into a collection of many prosodic types, each instantiated here and there in different languages, but never simultaneously realized within a single language. Two strands of recent work, that of Selkirk (2009:205–219, 2011a), and of Ito and Mester (2007, 2009a, 2009b) converge on a common theme from different directions. On the one hand, Selkirk has developed a vastly simplified approach to the syntax–prosody mapping which distinguishes only three levels (word, phrase, and clause) where syntactic constituents are systematically made to correspond to phonological domains (“Match Theory”). On the other hand, Ito and Mester have argued that the empirically necessary subcategories (such as Minor vs. Major Phrase) need to be understood not as additional categories existing in their own right, but rather as instances of recursively deployed basic categories. This paper carries forward this line of prosodic hierarchy research and shows that the recursion-based conception implemented within Match Theory allows for a conceptually and empirically cleaner understanding of the phonological facts and generalizations in Japanese as well as for an understanding of the respective roles of syntax and phonology in determining prosodic constituent structure organization, and the limitation in types of distinctions in prosodic category that are made in phonological representation. Finally, a formal constraint-based OT analysis is developed that provides an account of the varying tonal and accentual structures in syntactic collocations of varying sizes and structures.