• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.187-200
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• 2002

The purpose of the present study is to see in terms of $F_{0}$ variation in Japanese how discourse focus and the lexical word accent interact with each other in realizing overall intonation patterns. Discourse focus causes prosodic restructuring of phrase structures and, as a result, largely affects pitch contours, whereas the lexical word accent is said to delimit the $F_{0}$ into a certain range. Measurement of $F_{0}$ was made of utterances of Japanese sentences to observe behavior of pitch contours with varied focus assignment and lexical accent specifications. The utterances were obtained in question-answer discourse contexts so that in a sentence, either one NP was always focused or no focus was assigned. I set four points for $F_{0}$ measurement; $F_{1s},F_{1m}, F_{2s}$, and $F_{2m}$, two for each noun phrase corresponding to $F_{0}$ at the beginning of the first syllable and that of the vocalic portion of the second syllable in the two NP's. The results of present study were as follows: (1) for all combination of lexical accent types, the $F_{0}$ rise both in NP1 and NP2 are higher when focused than when not focused. (2) NP2 starts a new accentual phrase when focused, showing even higher $F_{0}$ than NP1, the latter of which implies that in forming a new accentual phrase by focusing, catathesis does not seem to take effect on NP2 preceded by accented NP1. (3) unfocused NP2 preceded by unaccented NP1 has higher $F_{0}$ than those preceded by accented NP1.