Prosodic realization of syntactic phrase and clause boundaries in Tokyo Japanese

This paper presents the results of a production experiment on the syntax–prosody mapping in Tokyo Japanese, whereby the phonetic realization of syntactic phrase and clause boundaries were systematically compared. The data consist of 672 utterances of read speech from fourteen subjects. The results corroborate earlier findings on the mapping of syntactic phrases to phonological phrases, but do not support the claim that clauses are mapped to intonational phrases. Data from a few subjects suggest instead that there may be a mapping of discourse-related domains (such as topic and comment) to intonational phrases