Stressing about PF
January 29, 2011 at 4:22 pm noahmotion 2 comments
While I agree (without having seen the talk in question) with the main point of Josh’s post about ‘stress’ nativization in Japanese (i.e., I agree that it would be interesting to hear about why and where particular repairs occur), I have a nit to pick.
My (limited) understanding is that Japanese doesn’t have stress, it has pitch accent. There’s a compelling case to be made that stress is, at least in English, localized supra-glottal hyperarticulation. At the very least, it involves more than shifts in fundamental frequency; it also involves changes in duration and intensity. The phonetic details are likely somewhat different in other languages with stress (e.g., Dutch or Portuguese). The point here is that pitch accent in Japanese is all, or at least mostly, about fundamental frequency; duration and intensity undoubtedly vary systematically in Japanese, but not in the same way they do in ‘stress languages’ like English.
It may be that Mr. Albin presented the analysis in terms of stress, in which case he deserves the brunt of this criticism. If Josh is the one conflating stress and pitch accent, though, I am comfortable cutting plenty of slack. He’s a syntactician and computational linguist, after all, so even though he speaks Japanese, there’s no real reason for him to be immersed in this particular subset of phonetic and phonological arcana.
Despite the fact that I didn’t see the talk in question, I’ll venture an elaboration of Josh’s critique and suggest that, in exploring the why and where of pitch accent repairs, it would be interesting to know what the distribution of +/- A is in the native Japanese lexicon in the first place. Both + A and – A are acceptable in the language, after all, so the imposition of either on a borrowed word should count as nativization.
Given the differences between stress and pitch accent, I would want to be careful about what counts as +/- F, as well. I imagine it matters what language a word is borrowed from, and how f0 is used in that language, when deciding if the +/-A in Japanese is +/- F in any meaningful sense.
– Noah
Entry filed under: Historical Linguistics, Phonology. Tags: .
1. Joshua | January 29, 2011 at 4:52 pm
Mr. Albin mentioned the issue at the begining his talk, but didn’t elaborate at all, much less explain how the two might interact in the borrowing process. +/-F was presented as whether the weight falls in the same locus of the borrowed word as it did in the source language, and hands were waved over any effects of translating from stress to pitch accent.
As you surmised, I don’t much care, this not being my specialty. My main criticism was that the talk seemed to be reporting something obvious when the potential was there to find out something new. However, now that you’ve cleared up a bit about the difference between stress and pitch accent, I suppose even the features he’s reporting on had the ability to be a real contribution had he gone into the process of deciding how to translate stress into pitch accent in more detail. So count that as two strikes against him I guess. I doubt, however, that an 1892 dictionary is the best source for investigating this. Recent borrowings are probably more revealing.
2. noahmotion | January 29, 2011 at 5:06 pm
It may be that the determination of +/- F isn’t actually all that interesting, since f0 is likely to track stress pretty closely. The source language, and some of the basic facts about its stress and accent patterns, could very well be important and interesting with respect to +/- A in Japanse, though, along with any number of factors in Japanese itself.