Noun Faithfulness and Accent in Fukuoka Japanese

In the dialects of Japanese spoken in the city of Fukuoka, there are two ways in which the prosodic phonology of nouns differs from that of verbs and adjectives. First, verbs have an obligatory pitch accent, while nouns may be accented or unaccented. These dialects thus differ from dialects such as Tôkyô (McCawley 1968; Poser 1984), in which a word of any category may be either accented or unaccented, as well as from dialects such as Miyakonojô (Hirayama 1943; Haraguchi 1977), in which no lexical items, regardless of category, contrast for accentedness. The second difference between nouns and other lexical words in Fukuoka is in the phonology of accent location. In (accented) nouns, the location of the accent is lexically contrastive. However, the accent in verbs has a fixed location: it must appear on the penultimate syllable. The Fukuoka dialects are therefore different from those such as Kagoshima (Hirayama