SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The central goal of this thesis is to provide a principled account of various pitch accent phenomena in Standard Japanese, and to demonstrate that the formalism of pitch accent assignment is identical to that of stress assignment in languages such as English. I have followed the framework of government phonology, which attempts to replace the rule component of a phonology by a set of universal principles shared by all languages, plus a group of parameters which impose a limit on the ways in which language sound system may differ from one another. Some of the accentual processes which I have chosen to account for have already been treated in the literature. However, the analyses which these previous works offered are generally arbitrary and therefore lacking in explanatory value. With respect to the claim that the formalism of pitch accent assignment and stress assignment is identical, I offer a non-arbitrary account of pitch accent phenomena in nouns (with and without Case-marking particles), compounds, and also in sentences, all based on one set of principles and parameters. In other words, various accentual processes which have been treated as separate events, are now explained in a unified manner. Among the issues addressed is an explanatory account of the accent assignment of various noun-noun compounds. From the morphological and lexical accentual properties of the morphemes involved, the location of compound accent is found to be predictable. The topics of my thesis include a new approach to the assignment of pitch in a sentence. I show how high-pitch assignment reflects the syntactic structure of the sentence in question.