Japanese loanword accentuation: epenthesis and foot form interacting through edge-interior alignment

Japanese words are either accented (HL tonal melody: H | a m L | e ‘rain’ ) or unaccented (H tonal melody: a m H | e ‘candy’). Whereas the locus of accent (i.e. mora that bears H tone before a L tone, represented henceforth by acute accent) is lexically determined in native and Sino-Japanese nouns (e.g. híru ‘leech’; hirú ‘noon’), in loanwords it is predictable enough to suggest a grammatical explanation as shown below. McCawley (1968) observes an antepenultimate default loanword accent pattern, illustrated in (1).