Re: ReTonogenesis

Hi!

Kevin Athey <kevindeanathey@...> writes:
> said to fall on mora breaks.  BUT, having studied a lot of African tonality
> in school, my interpretation would be the other possibility:  that of pitch
> spreading, in which the accent is really H, which spreads left, with an
> additional rule to drop initial unaccented morae to L.
With this interpretation, how do you get three possible accent
patterns for a *bi*moraic word, when the accent *on* the morae instead
of in between?  I did not get this, I think.

BTW, I left out the detail of actual pitch change since a) I did not
remember them :-), b) they seem to be very different from dialect to
dialect, so the normal description holds for Tokyo accent only.  (At
least I remember a large table in 'The Languages of Japan').

**Henrik

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