Syntax and Downstep in Japanese

Abstract

Two distinct phenomena of Japanese sentence tonology appear to depend on surface syntactic structure. The first is Downstep, a change in pitch register which is manifested as a marked lowering in the stretch of an utterance following an accented syllable. The second is Initial Lowering, a rise to the second mora of a word, ascribed to the presence of a High tone on that second mora preceded by a Low tone at the word edge. (The characterizations we give of these two well-known phenomena are due to Poser (1984), Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1986) and Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988), hereafter PPB when referred to together.) That the downstepping of a syllable is a function — direct or indirect — of the syntactic relation between the word containing it and a preceding accented word can be illustrated simply by comparing the representations in (1) and (2). The two sentences contain identical sequences of accented lexical items. These words are organized into different surface phrase structures, and the pattern of Downstep differs accordingly.