Accents in Tokyo and Kyoto Japanese Vowel Quality in terms of Duration and Licensing Potency

This paper offers a phonological analysis of the compatibility between vowel quality and lexical accent in the Tokyo and the Kyoto dialects of Japanese. This work benefits not only from phonological considerations but also from acoustic analysis. Analyses from these two perspectives converge on the claim that the lexical determination of the head position, on which the lexical accent falls, reflects licensing potential at the segmental construction level. In the Tokyo dialect, the vowel /a / attracts lexical accents, while /u / on the other hand repels lexical accents, whereas in the Kyoto dialect, /u / attracts a high proportion of lexical accents. Acoustic measurements of vowel duration suggest that the longest vowel in the dialects in question attracts lexical accents the most, and the shortest vowel, the least. However, we encounter a difficulty in establishing the pecking order of the mid-vowels and high-front vowels in both dialects. A phonological analysis couched in the theory of Phonological Government provides an account of which vowels tend to attract or repel accents, calling upon the notion of licensing relations holding between Phonological Elements