Degree of Initial Lowering in Prosodic Structure O

In this paper we show a significant contrast in the realization of the Minor Phrase-initial rise in Japanese as a function of the XP vs. nonXP status of the syntactic branching structure at the left edge of which the rise is located. Sentences examined consisted of a sequence of lexically unaccented nouns followed by an accented verb. F0 values of both the L and the H edge tones of Minor Phrase are found to be more extreme at left XP edge, understood to be a prosodic Major Phrase edge. These differences produce an initial rise at Major Phrase edge that is significantly larger than that at Minor Phrase edge. 1