On the Right-Edge High Tone in Osaka Japanese

This research focuses on the nature of the right-edge high tone in Osaka Japanese, spoken in Osaka City and its surrounding area. Japanese is a pitch accent language in which pitch is used to mark a prosodically prominent unit in words. In previous analyses of Japanese dialects, word-level tones that appear at the edge of a prosodic word have also been viewed as a lexical property. However, this paper takes an alternative stance, in which the right-edge tone is predictable and therefore need not be specified for each lexical item. This idea can be implemented in two ways. One way is to postulate an edge tone that is added at the word level of the derivation, rather than being assigned to specific lexical entries. It is also possible to regard the right-edge tone as a consequence of markedness constraints, given that the prosodic pattern aligns with typological observations. Based on these two approaches, I will analyze a Japanese dialect in a way that tonal specifications in the lexicon are simplified.