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Final L and wL

 

As mentioned in the previous section, the accentual phrase in Tokyo Japanese is delimited by two tones: the H- phrasal tone and a final L% boundary tone. The L% boundary tone is marked in J_ToBI at the right edge of the accentual phrase (see also break index 2 in section 4.3). This L% tone label is aligned with the word and break index labels, and is marked at the end of every accentual phrase, even if there is an additional rise due to a H% or HL% boundary tone (see sections 3.3.3 and 3.3.4 for descriptions of these tones). Example utterance kazumi and others later in this paper show the marking of a L% before the rise to the H%. Example utterances sankaku and yane show the L% boundary tone on utterance final accentual phrases with no rise.

If the immediately following phrase (with no intervening pause) is initially accented, or begins with a long syllable, a wL% (``weak'' low) boundary tone is used instead of the L% (``strong'' low) tone. In such cases, the L% does not have enough time to be realized fully due to the immediately following high tone, and is undershot, resulting in a weak low (wL%). The utterance sankaku contains two wL% boundary tones marking the edges of the accentual phrases /sa'Nkaku no/ `triangle-GEN' (occurring before the initially accented word /ya'ne/ `roof'), and /ya'ne no/ `roof-GEN' (occurring before a word with a long first syllable /maNnaka/ `middle'). Example yane also has a wL% boundary tone marking the edge of the first phrase before the initially accented word /ma'do/ `window'.



Jennifer Venditti
Thu Mar 28 13:42:10 JST 1996