Penultimate Non-Lexical Prominence, or PNLP, is a variant of phrase final rising-falling intonation in Standard (Tokyo) Japanese. In the first half of the paper, phonetic difference between the authentic rising-falling intonation and PNLP was examined using the phonetic data of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ). In the last half, PNLP's linguistic function was analyzed using CSJ's monologue speech and clause boundary labels that provide information about the relative strengths of various clause boundaries. Analysis of the distribution of PNLP with reference to clause boundaries revealed two interesting functions. Firstly, PNLP seemed to have culminative function; it occurred, typically, only once in an utterance bounded by absolute (i.e., the strongest)clause boundaries. Secondly, modest delimitative function was also observed; PNLP occurred, most frequently, but not regularly, in the penultimate accentual phrase of an utterance thereby predicting the end of an utterance. These findings and pilot text analysis suggested tentative conclusion that native speakers of Japanese used PNLP to predict the end of an utterance and a change in topic at the utterance boundary.
