A low boundary tone is also marked at the beginning of utterance initial or post-pausal medial phrases. As with the final low boundary tone, this initial boundary tone has ``strong'' and ``weak'' variants depending on the characteristics of the initial part of the phrase, and should be labelled in the same manner as described in section 3.3.1 above. The label should be aligned exactly with the start of phonation, according to the waveform or spectrogram.
Example 
kazumi
shows the marking of %L
utterance initially. The first mora of the initial word /kazumi/ is
short and bears no accent, hence the use of the ``strong'' variant of
the %L boundary tone. In examples
sankaku
, 
yane
and 
narabu
, the utterance initial words
have either an accented first mora
(
sankaku
and
yane
) or begin with a long syllable
(
narabu
). In these cases, the ``weak''
variant of the initial boundary tone, %wL, is used.
This initial low boundary tone provides an anchor from which the F0
rises at the beginning of an utterance or after utterance medial
silent intervals. In the case of utterance medial phrases with no
preceding pause, the final L% of the preceding phrase serves this
purpose (and thus an additional initial %L or %wL boundary tone is
not necessary). However, there is one case in which it is necessary to
mark an initial low boundary tone even though no silence precedes it.
This is when an utterance medial phrase follows a H% boundary tone,
with no intervening pause. In such cases an F0 fall is observed from
the high boundary tone to a low point at the start of the next phrase.
The marking of %wL after H% is shown in the first part of example
utterance 
nibanme
. (For now, concentrate
only on the %wL boundary tone before the word /siNsitu/
`bedroom'. The rest of this utterance will be discussed in detail
below.)
![[GIF]](../GIF/EXAMPLES/nibanme1.gif)
![[GIF]](../GIF/EXAMPLES/nibanme2.gif)