マーク シュワーツ
Prosodic Marking of Information Status
in Tokyo Japanese
Abstract:This paper reports the results of a pilot study on the prosodic marking of information status, i.e., whether information is ‘new’ or ‘given’ in the discourse, in Tokyo Japanese noun phrases (NPs). Previous investigations have brought to light that such discoursal information is reflected in accent distribution in Dutch NPs, and in degree of accentuation in Italian NPs. First results on Japanese, in which accent is lexically determined, reveal that information status, both for accented and unaccented words, is mainly reflected in pitch range, with higher range used to signal new information, and lower range used to signal given information. In addition to the effect of discourse, there is 'downstep', which lowers the pitch of words following an accented word inside a prosodic phrase.