The effects of discourse focus and lexical accent on the prosodic phrasing in Japanese

Measurement of F0 was made of utterances of Japanese sentences to observe behavior of intonation contours with varied focus assignment and lexical accent specifications. Materials were 80 sentences of right‐branching structures of the type NP1‐NP2(‐NP3)‐VP, where 16 have two three‐mora NP’s and 64 three NP’s, including all the permutations of NP’s, each with one of the four lexical accent types. The utterances were generated in question–answer discourse contexts so that in a sentence, one NP was always focused. The results are: (1) focus assignment has no significant effect on NP1, (2) NP2 and NP3 are significantly higher when focused than when not focused, and (3) focused/unfocused NP2 preceded by unaccented NP1 is significantly higher than those preceded by accented NP1, and so is NP3 preceded by NP2 with the same conditions. These suggest that focus assignment on NP2/NP3 requires rephrasing there, that a lexical accent of an NP narrows the pitch range of the following phrase, and that the prosodic stat...