Prominence Marking in the Japanese Intonation System

Japanese uses a variety of prosodic mechanisms to mark focal prominence, including local pitch range expansion, prosodic restructuring to set off the focal constituent, post-focal subordination, and prominence-lending boundary pitch movements, but (notably) not manipulation of accent. In this paper, we describe the Japanese intonation system within the AutosegmentalMetrical model of intonational phonology, and review these prosodic mechanisms that have been shown to mark focal prominence. We point out potentials for ambiguity in the prosodic parse, and discuss their larger implications for the development of a tenable general theory of prosody and its role in the marking of discourse structure.

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