Pitch Accent of “Rashii” in the Keihan Dialects: About the Regional Differences and Generation Differences

Abstract

This paper examines the accent of an auxiliary verb “Rashii” which indicates inference in the modern language, based on the accents of young to old generations in Ōsaka, Hyōgo (Awaji), and Kōchi.

While the preceding studies so far have pointed out various tendencies in the accents of “Rashii” and enclitic words, this paper has similarly identified that multiple tendencies appear as the differences among regions and generations. As the reason for this, the paper points out that it is related to the development of “Rashii”—which indicates inference in the modern language—from the suffix “Rashii”—which creates adjectives. Moreover, it also states that the expressions of type-3 such as HLL and type-2 such as HHL/LHL for the accent of “Rashii” itself have some relevance to the terminal form accent of adjectives.