Manifestation of downstep and intonation in Japanese: comparison of the Tokyo and Kochi dialects

This paper examines the manifestation of downstep and intonation in the Tokyo and Kochi dialects of Japanese by using three types of syntactically balanced material adjective phrases, adverbial phrases, and sentence modifiers. The main conclusion is that Kochi speakers produce a smaller Major Phrase consisting of fewer lexical accents than in the Tokyo dialect, the Major Phrase being defined as the domain of downstep. In addition, the two dialects differ considerably as to the distribution of F0 peaks in downstepping the lexical accents, the distance being greater in the Tokyo dialect. These findings support a prosodic typology of Japanese dialects in which the weight of accent and intonation differ.