Prominence in a Pitch Language: The Production and Perception of Japanese

This work examines the way in which prominence--a perceptual feature that is highlighted by speakers as being important through prosodic, syntactic, and semantic cues--is marked and perceived in Japanese. Drawing on extensive quantitative data, the authors argue that Japanese, unlike non-agglutinative languages, marks prominence on content words as well as function morphemes, that local F0 boost and boundary pitch movement (BPM) are the cues to mark prominence, that the domain of the focal prominence differs on which cue it is loaded with, and that BPM is possibly aligned to function morphemes and invokes a pragmatic implicature.

Shinobu Mizuguchi is professor emeritus of linguistics at Kobe University. Koichi Tateishi is professor of linguistics at Kobe College.