The Composition of Phonological Phrases in nagara-Clause Containing a Light Verb and the Tonal Neutralization

Abstract

This paper examines a progressing accentual change observed in nagara-clause containing a light verb, which entails tonal neutralization. It reveals that the tonal specification of the word immediately preceding the verb exerts a profound effect on the occurrence of neutralization by examining the speech data in the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. The results of the quantitative analysis indicate that neutralization is promoted when the preceding word is unaccented, whereas it is suppressed when the preceding word is accented. The second half of the paper provides a theoretical discussion of the results, illustrating that two prosodic constraints, culminativity and OCP, serve as the significant factors determining whether the neutralization occurs.