Prosodic typology in Japanese dialects from a cross-linguistic perspective

Abstract

In the typology of prosodic phrasing in Japanese dialects that the author has proposed previously, the dialects are categorized into those in which an accentual phrase (AP) generally contains only one word, and those in which it can contain two or more words. This paper shows that this typology can be applied to languages that have the same sort of AP as in Japanese, such as Seoul Korean, French and Northern Bizkaian Basque. It is also shown that the cross-linguistic difference similar to that in AP-level prosodic phrasing can also be observed in languages in which AP is difficult to define, such as English and Spanish. In order to describe these languages in a unified framework, it is proposed that they be divided according to how densely pitch events (such as post-lexical pitch accents and AP boundaries) are distributed with respect to the number of words. This division may hold a clue to language-specific mapping between prosody and syntax/focus.