1988Unpublished venueRequires access

Japanese Tone Structure

Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Mary E. Beckman

Open publisher page 830 citations

Abstract

Tone Structure provides a thorough, phonetically grounded description of accent and intonation in Tokyo Japanese and uses it to develop an explicit account of surface phonological representation. The unusual amount of quantitative phonetic data analyzed and its testing in a detailed model make this an important new study for theoretical phonologists, phoneticians, and specialists in Japanese.The authors' broader purpose, however, is to develop a general theory of surface representation that can capture salient facts about prosodic structure in all languages and provide a suitable input to phonetic rules. The theory integrates autosegmental principles into a metrical account of prosodic structures in an explicit formalism. The work establishes phonology and phonetics as a productive area in cognitive science.Janet B. Pierrehumbert is a member of the technical staff in the Department of Artificial Intelligence Research at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Mary E. Beckman is an Assistant Professor in the Department. of Linguistics at Ohio State University. Tone Structure is a Linguistic Inquiry Monograph.

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What this paper is about

Tone Structure provides a thorough, phonetically grounded description of accent and intonation in Tokyo Japanese and uses it to develop an explicit account of surface phonological representation. The unusual amount of quantitative phonetic data analyzed and its testing in a detailed model make this an important new study for theoretical phonologists, phoneticians, and specialists in Japanese.The authors' broader purpose, however, is to develop a general theory of surface representation that can capture salient facts about prosodic structure in all languages and provide a suitable input to phonetic rules. The theory integrates autosegmental principles into a metrical account of prosodic structures in an explicit formalism. The work establishes phonology and phonetics as a productive area in cognitive science.Janet B. Pierrehumbert is a member of the technical staff in the Department of Artificial Intelligence Research at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Mary E. Beckman is an Assistant Professor in the Department. of Linguistics at Ohio State University. Tone Structure is a Linguistic Inquiry Monograph.

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Available abstract

Tone Structure provides a thorough, phonetically grounded description of accent and intonation in Tokyo Japanese and uses it to develop an explicit account of surface phonological representation. The unusual amount of quantitative phonetic data analyzed and its testing in a detailed model make this an important new study for theoretical phonologists, phoneticians, and specialists in Japanese.The authors' broader purpose, however, is to develop a general theory of surface representation that can capture salient facts about prosodic structure in all languages and provide a suitable input to phonetic rules. The theory integrates autosegmental principles into a metrical account of prosodic structures in an explicit formalism. The work establishes phonology and phonetics as a productive area in cognitive science.Janet B. Pierrehumbert is a member of the technical staff in the Department of Artificial Intelligence Research at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Mary E. Beckman is an Assistant Professor in the Department. of Linguistics at Ohio State University. Tone Structure is a Linguistic Inquiry Monograph.

Key concepts: Linguistics, Tone (literature), Phonology, Pitch accent, Representation (politics), Intonation (linguistics), Salient, Theoretical linguistics

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