This study examined the regional diversity of Standard Japanese (SJ) focusing on the accentual variation in nagara-clause. The results of our analysis utilizing the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese indicated that a common principle underlies the variation in SJs spoken in the metropolitan area and its surrounding areas: the frequency of the variation, in which a pitch fall emerges anew, increases in response to the length of verbs preceding nagara. In contrast, no such correspondence is observed for SJs in the region of accentless dialects and Western Japan, but a positive preference for neutralization characterizes the latter. As for the Keihanshin area, the variation frequency is remarkably lower, suggesting that speakers refer to the rules of their native dialects in parallel with utilizing those in SJ.
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