Prosodic Adjunction in Japanese Compounds*

This paper explores a particular part of the prosodic hierarchy—the area falling between the prosodic word and the phonological phrase. It develops a framework that reduces the types of genuine prosodic categories while at the same time making systematic use of adjunction structures and concomitant functional notions like maximal and minimal instantiations of categories. A detailed analysis of the prosodic typology of compounds in Japanese suggests that the theory maintains enough flexibility to distinguish what needs to be distinguished but avoids multiplying prosodic categories beyond necessity.