This paper examines the accent of an auxiliary verb “Rashii” which indicates inference in the modern language, based on the accents of young to old generations in Ōsaka, Hyōgo (Awaji), and Kōchi.

While the preceding studies so far have pointed out various tendencies in the accents of “Rashii” and enclitic words, this paper has similarly identified that multiple tendencies appear as the differences among regions and generations. As the reason for this, the paper points out that it is related to the development of “Rashii”—which indicates inference in the modern language—from the suffix “Rashii”—which creates adjectives. Moreover, it also states that the expressions of type-3 such as HLL and type-2 such as HHL/LHL for the accent of “Rashii” itself have some relevance to the terminal form accent of adjectives.

In Japanese, there are two ways to emphasize degree or quantity. One is to use the adverb, and the other is to use subordinate clause. In this paper, the functionality of subordinate clause being used as both degree and quantity modifier is analyzed based on scale structure. According to our research, when act as modifier, the adverb emphasizes either degree or quantity while the subordinate clause generally implies both degree and quantity. Based on the analysis of the adverb, we examined degree and quantity modification exhibited in subordinate clause. In conclusion, the Hodo-clause modifies the degree in essence whilst the Bun-clause essentially modifies the quantity, although both of the clauses can extend their modification to the other end. To clarify our point, we have extended the scale-structure analysis to complex sentences, which is challenging since it was only applied to simple sentences traditionally. We believe that widening the application range of scale-structure analysis will contribute to the study of the relationship between simple sentence and complex sentence.