Deaccenting, MAXIMIZE PRESUPPOSITION and Evidential Scale

Some studies have assumed that prosodic patterns of sentences are exclusively determined by the rules of accented expressions, with deaccenting of non-focused elements playing little or no role [1, 2]. However, many researchers have also recognized the importance of deaccenting rules [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. This paper documents two intonational patterns of Japanese biased questions, ”Rise with Accents” and ”Rise with Deaccentuation”, used by young speakers of the Tokyo dialect for Japanese biased questions. We argue that Japanese data furthers the deaccenting-as-rule view. Specifically, deaccentuation in biased questions has recently gained a grammaticalized status, and now gives rise to a Givenness presupposition. Moreover, the presuppositions of Bias and Givenness form a scale, i.e., Given ⊂ Bias, which interacts with MAXIMIZE PRESUPPOSITION [8]. Our proposal also naturally extends to the evidential hierarchy proposed in the literature.