Interactions between lexical and postlexical tones

AbstractThis chapter examines how lexical and postlexical tones interact with each other in vocative intonation (calling tunes) across several Japanese dialects. The four dialects examined here vary in the organization of lexical prosody from the mora-based multipattern system of standard Tokyo Japanese to the syllable-based two-pattern system of Kagoshima Japanese. While exhibiting word-final pitch fall as a common feature of vocative intonation, these dialects differ in the way the boundary tone is manifested, which can be attributed at least in part to the differences in their lexical prosodic organization. Our data also support crosslinguistic observations reported in the literature: (i) that intonational boundary tones generally win over lexical tones to resolve tonal clash or crowding, and (ii) that one syllable can generally bear up to two tones. They also show that postlexical tonal neutralizations take place to differing degrees across the dialects as lexical tones are overridden by postlexical ones.