Asian Pacific Rim

This chapter describes the prosodic systems of Japanese and Korean, the two major languages spoken in the Asian Pacific Rim. It covers both lexical and post-lexical prosody of these languages, with the main focus on word accent and intonation. As for word accent, Japanese and Korean both exhibit various pitch accent systems ranging from those with multiple accent patterns to those in which pitch plays no distinctive role at the lexical level. The intonation systems of these two languages are also diverse, ranging from those with purely phrasal or boundary tones to those where intonational tones are constrained by lexical pitch accent patterns. However, both languages have an accentual phrase as the smallest prosodic unit defined by intonation. Similarities and differences between the prosodic systems of these two languages, including various regional dialects in each language, are analysed in the framework of the autosegmental-metrical model of intonational phonology.

Focus (optics) · Intonation (linguistics) · Linguistics · Phonology · Phrase · Pitch accent · Prosody · Stress (linguistics) · Computer Science · Phonetics and Phonology Research