Abstract
This study investigated both the extent of accentual paradigm (analogical) leveling observed in adjectives in Tokyo Japanese and the factors influencing the change based on spoken data from 36 speakers in their late teens, 20s, 30s, and 40s. Multivariate analyses showed that adjective accent variation was strongly conditioned by grammatical factors (e.g., inflectional forms, the following grammatical elements, and word frequency) and moderately affected by phonetic factors (e.g., the sonority hierarchy of the consonant of the syllable on which the accent falls, stem length, and vowel devoicing). In contrast, extralinguistic factors played almost no role in predicting the variation.
