Word structure and accentuation in Japanese—Is Japanese basic accent the antepenultimate type?

Abstract

It has been reported that the accent nucleus of a Japanese word tends to be located on the antepenultimate mora, i.e., the third mora counted from the end of the word (henceforth, the antepenultimate type). This tendency of the accent pattern of Japanese has been confirmed through various statistical analyses [e.g., S. Hashimoto, Trans. Inst. Electron. Commun. Eng. Jpn. 56-D, 654–661 (1973)]. In this paper, the relationship between word structure and accent pattern has been investigated using about 50 000 headwords in the Japanese Accent Dictionary to explain why the antepenultimate type appears to be the most frequent accent pattern in Japanese. The results show that this accent type mainly originates from compound accentuation in (full word + full word) and (full word + affix) concatenations, rather than being an intrinsic accent type of the Japanese language. Further study on the intrinsic accent of basic Japanese words of four morae or less has been conducted. The results will be reported according to the origin of the analyzed words, including original Japanese, Sino-Japanese, and loan words (from western languages).