The Prosody of Public Evidence in Japanese: A Rating Study

The correlation between Information Structure and prosody has been central in theoretical and experimental studies. In particular, many studies have shown that focus induces particular prosodic patterns cross-linguistically. In Japanese, for instance, pitch register of the words following a focused element is reduced (called ‘post-focus/focal reduction’ in Sugahara 2003 and Ishihara 2003, 2007; see also Tomioka 2009; Kitagawa 2005, 2006). Our study identifies a similar yet distinct kind of deaccentuation which can be regarded as a reflection of another semantic-pragmatic phenomenon, evidentiality.