Abstract
The present paper compares the phonology of two typologically-unrelated languages, Japanese and Winnebago, and characterizes their 'accent' in terms of phonetic interpretation, basic tone melody, tonal rules, sonority hierarchy, prosodic structure (mora, syllable, foot, etc.), and word minimality. I will show that in spite of the existence of their apparently distinct typological and structural properties, these languages nonetheless exhibit striking similarities when seen from accentual typology in the generative paradigm, or universal grammar. My arguments will lead to the following specific claims: 1) they both are pitch-accent languages although they are different in some tonal rules; 2) they both are mora-counting, syllable-accenting languages and constitute a mirror-image pattern with distinct moraic structures; 3) in theoretical terms, they have moraic feet and foot extrametricality in common, which, however, are assigned from the opposite directions; and 4) they each have a distinct minimal word requirement, which is evidenced by the minimal size of a word and the existence of unaccented words. I will also demonstrate that the apparent diversities of their accentual characters directly follow from a few differences in rules and parameter values for tonal and prosodic structures.
