Syntactic and rhythmic effects on downstep in Japanese

The past decade or so has seen increasing interest in prosodic research, and remarkable progress has been made in the study of accent and intonation, both empirical and theoretical. Research in Japanese intonation is no exception in this respect, as evidenced by such works as Poser (1984) and Beckman & Pierrehumbert (1986), among others, which have developed theoretical discussions on many interesting phonological issues on the basis of their own experimental evidence.