15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Tonal Specification of Two Falling Pitch Patterns in Akita Japanese

Kenji Yoshida

Shoin University, Japan

The present study examines the difference of phonetic realization of two types of falling pitch pattern in the Akita dialect of Japanese and seeks for the explanation of the difference in the tonal specifications of them. The analysis of acoustic measurements shows that the two types can be clearly discriminated by the steepness of the F₀ fall. The gradual pitch fall is also observed in the longer words and phrases, extending beyond the constituent boundary. I argue that the different shape of the F₀ contour results from the tonal specification of the two word classes; the words in unaccented class in the dialect lacks phrasal H tone, unlike the standard Tokyo Japanese. The result suggests that the tone specification in the dialect only consisted in sentential and phrasal terminal tones and tone of the lexical accent.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Yoshida, Kenji (2003): "Tonal specification of two falling pitch patterns in Akita Japanese", In ICPhS-15, 1293-1296.