Word Prosody and Phrasing Rules in the Dialect of Kumamoto City and Its Surrounding Areas

Abstract

The dialect of the city of Kumamoto in Kyushu and its surrounding areas is said to lack lexical accent systems. Sentences uttered by 15 speakers were acoustically examined in order to identify the rules that characterize the sentence prosody in this variety of Japanese. Semantic restriction and focus were found to be the determining factors of intonational phrasing. The results also revealed that words have a tonal autonomy, with a rise at the beginning and a fall that may occur in any position of the word except for the beginning. This suggests that this dialect should be considered to have word accent ("indefinite" accent) contrary to the traditional view.