Japanese/Korean Linguistics

Japonic varieties exhibit considerable diversity in their pitch accents, defined here as the tones associated with lexically specified accent positions. However, this diversity has rarely been analyzed within a cross-linguistically comparable framework. This study recasts Japonic pitch-accent systems in Autosegmental-Metrical terms. It shows that the four alignment-defined bitonal pitch accents—L+H*, L*+H, H*+L, and H+L*—correspond closely to the four accent-kernel types developed independently within Japanese linguistics, and that Japonic also attests monotonal pitch accents, H* and L*. Since modern Japonic varieties generally permit only one pitch-accent type within a given system, these types do not contrast paradigmatically and need not be underlyingly specified. Instead, cross-variety differences are analyzed as differences in tone-assignment rules, parameterized by the identity of the starred tone and the presence or absence of default leading and trailing tones. This approach provides a unified typology of Japonic pitch accent and facilitates comparison with general phonological theory.