Prosodic Independence of Bimoraic Accented Particles: Analysis of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese

Abstract

In Tokyo Japanese, bimoraic accented particles like /ma'de/ and /su'ra/ are believed to lose their lexical accent when they are coupled with accented content words like /kyo'Hto made/. The deletion of particle accent, however, does not occur regularly. There are cases where particles constitute independent accentual phrases of their own, thereby preserving their lexical accents like in /kyo'Hto ma'de/. This paper examines this prosodic phenomenon by analyzing the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ). Analysis of CSJ revealed that none of ten particles examined in this study showed perfectly regular accent deletion. It also turned out that there were four factors that favored independence of particles, viz., 1) semantic property of particles, 2) distance between preceding lexical accent and that of particles, 3) presence of BPM tones in the particles, and, 4) speaking style. Various analyses suggested consistently that it was the semantic property of particles that was the most influential. Particles of contrast and/or limitation (toritate nojoshi) like /ko'so/, /su'ra/, /sa'e/, /no'mi/ tend to retain their accent and prosodic independence much more frequently when compared to other particles including /na'do/, /ma'de/, /yo'ri/, /de'wa/, and /de'mo/.