Accent Patterns and Alternations

Basic accents. Japanese pitch accent is primarily one of word and phrase , although lesser elements—even individual morphs—sometimes influence the basic accent of the word in which they occur. Each word has an inherent or basic accent pattern. This pattern sometimes shows alternations in the various alternants of the word, depending on particular word environments in the pitch phrase, or on the pitch-phoneme limitations of the phrase itself (see §3.5).